Express pensions represent the next major innovation from EFKA, as it is expected to proceed with issuing pensions within one month of the insured person’s application. The new process will simultaneously cover primary and supplementary insurance, following the completion of stamp digitization from 1998 and earlier, which is expected to be substantially completed by autumn 2026.
Read: EFKA: Express pension issuance in one month with stamp digitization by 2026
Progress of digitization in insurance funds
The recording of old stamps in several funds is already progressing at very rapid rates and has already been completed, which is expected to be the prelude to the unification of primary and supplementary pensions that will take place from August this year.
Digitization is moving at high rates in funds such as those for Professionals and Press at over 75%, while in others including IKA and OAEE it stands at 60% and 45% respectively.
In detail, the digitization percentages range:
· Professionals Fund (ETAA-TSAU): 92%
· TSMEDE: 98%
· ETAP-MME: 75%
· Three OAEE entities (TEVE, TSA, TAE): 42%
The ATLAS system and paperless insurance
Insured persons can find their insurance biography in the ATLAS system, which digitally records their work life after 2001, serving as the passport for pension issuance in one day. The conversion of stamps to paperless insurance through digitization of paper archives from all funds concerns both primary and supplementary insurance.
The digitization of stamps starts from 1980 onwards and includes the entire insurance history and changes of workers for a 45-year period, essentially covering those who began collecting their first stamps from the age of 20.
Historic record of pension issuances from EFKA
As noted in the newspaper “Apogevmatini,” EFKA administrator Alexandros Varveris reports that from January 2021 to today, over 1,000,000 primary pensions have been issued. This is a historic record for EFKA that promises even faster procedures with express pensions.
Today, pending primary pensions have been reduced to approximately 15,000. This is a manageable number, consisting mainly of cases with particularities, for example due to existing debts, incomplete insurance data, or complex successive insurance.
Implementation timeline for express pensions
Converting stamps to digital insurance time is the first stage for calculating pensions in one day. The second and more important stage is that digital insurance times must be readable by EFKA’s systems.
Practically, the second stage requires that from the moment the insured person applies for retirement, EFKA must be able to see which funds they were insured with and at what earnings, in order to calculate the pension immediately.
This stage of processing the digital archive with insurance times will take several months, until December 2026, when EFKA has set as a milestone the granting of primary pensions within a few hours. It’s worth noting that in the last two years, waiting time for successive insurance has also decreased dramatically, now reaching one and a half years from the 2 to 5 years that was the wait in most funds in 2019.
