Acerta makes payroll secure and stable with Axway SecureTransport

There is no mission more critical for any business than ensuring its people get paid. That’s why Acerta, one of the largest HR service providers in Belgium, smooths the process of managing all HR-related processes for more than 600,000 people with Axway MFT and Amplify Platform.

Achieving platform stability and scalability

SecureTransport enables Acerta to make hundreds of thousands of calculations per day and manage MFT flows with external partners to print pay slips and send them to employees. Acerta also uses the Axway software to send payment files directly to banks.

Franz-Jozef Schopp, MFT specialist and consultant for Contrast Consulting, explains how Acerta strengthened operational efficiency, security, and platform stability by migrating from a mix of MFT systems to a unified Axway solution.

“SecureTransport is a critical application for Acerta,” he says. “We are communicating for all those Belgian employees and companies. We have to send notifications to the government. So it’s very crucial to this day to have a stable platform.”

Franz-Jozef Schopp adds that Acerta does more than 500 000 calculations per month on its mainframe while making more than 200,000 payroll transfers a day.

“So it’s quite an impressive ecosystem,” he says. “If it stays down, it’s critical, but the system is quite stable… The last couple of years we only had very, very minor issues with SecureTransport.”

See Contraste MFT Consultant Franz-Jozef Schopp explain how Acerta strengthened its MFT ecosystem with Axway.

ACERTA | Axway

Protecting customer HR data

SecureTransport provides Acerta and its customers additional layers of security on top of industry standards, such as TLS 1.2 encryption and FIPS 140-2 certification. This helps Acerta protect customer data from unauthorized access or manipulation during the transfer process.

And because it is cloud-agnostic, users can benefit from a high degree of flexibility across different deployment models — whether on-prem or in the cloud — without sacrificing security or performance.

Onboarding customers faster

Acerta developed a DevOps environment that configures flows through APIs on SecureTransport and also deploys the flows to the different environments.

This enables Acerta to configure all MFT flows in templates that speed the onboarding of new customers. With this DevOps capability, Acerta has shortened the intake time for new customers from a week or more in the past to a few hours today.

Transfer CFT takes the complexity out of integrating applications across platforms, operating systems, and locations. The multi-platform, multi-site file transfer controller enables Acerta to build critical, high-volume, application-to-application data flows.

Leveraging MFT alongside APIs

More recently, Acerta has been leveraging API integration with Axway’s Amplify Platform to roll out new self-service capabilities across its digital ecosystem.

“In order to achieve these volumes, there are not a lot of players that both offer APIs and file transfers. Axway had both options available, and it was very key for us to have one partner managing both and this is how we came to the usage numbers that we have today,” says Cliff Haerden, Director Infrastructure and Operations at Acerta.

In a new interview, Cliff Haerden shares why Axway covers their needs for both APIs and MFT, and how they are leveraging both to provide end-to-end services.

With a cloud-first strategy, Acerta is anticipating the use of Axway’s Amplify Enterprise Marketplace for external services and potential monetization opportunities.

“The customer will just have a very nice page with the same layout as they know but it will be the marketplace behind. That transparency and the integration possibilities are a very interesting way of integrating new possibilities for customers to consume our APIs and maybe in the future even monetize them,” concludes Haerden.

Acerta’s Axway environment positions them to meet changing customer needs for MFT and API speed, scalability, and security.