Risk management is the process of identifying, analysing, accepting, mitigating or transferring uncertainty in investment decisions. Fund managers apply risk management by analysing and attempting to quantify the potential loss of an investment and then acting accordingly.

Institutions are being transformed thanks to the integration of new technologies. This vision represents a corporate change with a social impact, reducing costs, simplifying processes and procedures, and raising awareness of the importance and benefits of this transformation.

The institution does not have any automatic mechanism to inform it of the death of a citizen outside of the country. This is why beneficiaries living outside of the country are obliged to submit proof of life in order to avoid the suspension of their benefit payments.

Uruguay’s Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) manages the National System of Labour Certification, (Sistema Nacional de Certificación Laboral – SNCL), which centralizes the register of medical leave certificates for active workers for social security purposes.

Article 12 of Law No. 5508 on the Promotion, Protection of Maternity and Support for Breastfeeding establishes that maternity allowance should be paid to employed women by the social security scheme of Paraguay’s Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social – IPS). This amount is equivalent to 100 per cent of her salary at the time of delivery, and is paid for the prescribed months of rest. This used to be given to women in a single payment.

The law passed in February 2022 defined how to proceed in the event of a major mutual fund closing for reasons of non-viability, establishing incorporation criteria for members and employees within a new structure. In accordance with the legislative criteria, the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista) was one of the institutions included in this process.

The issue of population growth and social security planning is one of the biggest challenges facing governments today, and is a key part of a good social security system that instils confidence in its members.

The Retirement and Pension Fund for Employees of Banks and Related Institutions (Caja de Jubilaciones y Pensiones de Empleados de Bancos y Afines) (Bank Fund, hereinafter) is in constant communication with its members. It therefore continuously updates its databases, in order to have a better understanding of members’ current realities, experiences and needs.

Between 2015 and 2017, the National Institute of Social Security (Instituto Nacional de Segurança Social – INSS) of Angola outlined a strategy to ensure the sustainability of social security with a strong focus on modernizing the management and control of social security revenues. With the resources to use information and communication technology (ICT) for its implementation, in the last five years, a set of initiatives have been progressively and intensively operationalized to end with most administrative processes.

Digital transformation is happening in institutions through the integration of new technologies. This vision represents an institutional and social change, optimizing available resources, reducing costs, shortening processes and procedures, and raising awareness of the importance and benefits of this transformation.

Good practice in health – service quality.

As health-care systems have evolved to become more complex and due to the resultant increase in patients coming to harm in health care settings, patient safety has emerged as a health-care discipline.

The Actuarial Advisory Office (Asesoría Actuarial) of the Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social – IPS) carried out an actuarial valuation of the Common Retirement and Pension Fund (Fondo Común de Jubilaciones y Pensiones). The valuation looks to comply with international best practices and observe the guidelines and standards of the International Standards of Actuarial Practice 2 (ISAP 2), and the ISSA-ILO Guidelines on Actuarial Work for Social Security, with technical support from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

This good practice was first introduced in July 2020 and rapidly became a key management tool, especially against the background of growing needs as a result of the pandemic.

The information technology (IT) service of the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) of Uruguay has developed a robot – its aim is to automate, speed up and enhance the efficiency of processes for receiving requests for help, with regard to IT issues and/or citizen applications concerning benefits at moments when the institute’s call centre is experiencing high demand or is overwhelmed (i.e. the current pandemic, tax responsibilities falling due or the issuance of new benefits, etc.).

Like most of the world’s countries, Paraguay has adopted lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. These steps taken by the government have impacted the productive sector, leading to mass suspensions of employment contracts for persons insured with the Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social – IPS) of Paraguay.

The process of Proof of Life (PV) was based on stages, processes and the best technological resources available in 2011 (biometric collection). However, during the last decade there have been technological advances that have influenced and encouraged Angolan citizens to access to new technologies and allow the National Institute of Social Security (Instituto Nacional de Segurança Social – INSS) to progressively make available more agile and secure services to taxpayers, policyholders and pensioners.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a challenge as the world has had to face situations unthinkable at a time when global technology and communication are distinctive elements of society. As in the past, solutions for fighting the disease have included lockdown, social distancing, quarantine and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Despite the significant growth of workers in the social security system during the last decade, more than 7 million workers still remain unintegrated.

Investments in operational and technological management to simplify and facilitate declaration and contribution collection, which have contributed to the results achieved, have not been sufficient to change this situation.

In accordance with the health emergency decreed by the government and with state policies, our mutual fund, the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista), has since mid-March, been implementing a strategic plan to combat and control the COVID-19 pandemic.

Certain actions have been carried out to minimise the risk to the institution’s workers.

Paraguay’s Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión de Social – IPS) used to make sick leave payments at its administrative offices, which had associated administrative costs and meant beneficiaries had to visit the IPS service counter in person.

Eliminating paper from our desks: A utopian dream? No, it can be done, and not at any cost, by creating jobs for young people and making the right investment for the times we live in.

The recipe for success includes planning, the right to make mistakes and recalculations, the achievement of guarantees and the realisation that we cannot ignore the path the organisation has been on, as, in our job, history matters.

The complexity of and demand for services in the field of information and communication technologies (ITC) that underpin the achievement of the institutional objectives of the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) of Uruguay have grown systematically and increasingly rapidly over the years.

As the BPS’s pension coverage addresses contingencies that arise in the course of a citizen’s life, from birth to death, it has a very high social impact.

Between 2015 and 2022, various legislative, operational, and technological measures were developed and implemented to ensure the long-term sustainability of social security, with emphasis on the modernization and automation of declarations of remuneration, contributions management, payments, and regularization of the debt.

The challenges were enormous. Thus, a strategy was established for the progressive and integrated implementation of several measures:

The National register of support providers (Registro Nacional de Obligados
Alimentarios - RENOA) receives, stores and manages information on all support contributions determined by Family Courts in Uruguay within the framework of Act 19480, the beneficiaries of which are children, adolescents and incapacitated adults.

The register enables continuity of service in the payment of statutory contributions, in that it:

Modernisation and the use of new technologies by taxpayers make the job of the comptroller, which is to ensure greater inclusion in social security, increasingly difficult. There is a need, therefore, to improve management through innovation and the use of disruptive technologies and optimised procedures, which enable more efficient and effective control, with the aim of promoting better fiscal behaviour and ensuring the inclusion of many more workers.

The Social Protection Longitudinal Survey (Encuesta Longitudinal de Protección Social – ELPS) was part of the “support program for better management of the social protection system”, which aims to strengthen the capacity to formulate and implement policies on social security, education, housing, employment, health, disability, and care among other things. Therefore, the conditions and capacities required to continue with future ELPS phases were generated, with the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) as the managing institution.

The 21st century advent in our country of the sharing economy, which involves the contracting of goods and services through electronic platforms, has led to the emergence of disruptive enterprises such as the hiring of transport services through mobile phone applications.

Special Assistance (Ayuda Extraordinaria – AYEX) is a non-contributory benefit provided by the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS), aimed at responding to the socio-educational needs of persons with disabilities covered by the social security system.

The purpose of the benefit is to enable persons to regain skills, compensate lost functions and obtain a maximum degree of autonomy and a better quality of life, with their abilities and aspirations.

Over the past few years, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has been promoting and exploring the possibility of using public software rather than creating a new system or issuing a call for tenders to acquire one, with the aim of making optimum use of government resources and to avoid “reinventing the wheel”. The term “public software” is used to describe any piece of software that has been developed using government resources and that should therefore be available for the different government organizations to share.

E-training has come to the fore as a means of enabling training programmes to be offered to the organization’s officials on a large scale. Until now, the method has relied on so-called Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), and more specifically the Moodle platform, which is used by the institution.

The aim is to improve this training method by adopting videoconferencing as an e-training tool, using synchronous techniques to enable real-time interaction between speakers in different locations and, with other strategies, to replicate on-site courses.

As part of its policies to promote a social security institution that is more effective and efficient and closer to the people, allowing their quality of life to be improved, a strategy for multi-channel services has been drawn up with the aim of offering citizens different channels of customer service depending on their needs.

The Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista – CCOUM) is part of the integrated national health system in Uruguay. In this regard, it is a provider of total health coverage as it has been a link of the country’s social security system thanks to its mutual structure.

Currently, it has approximately 92,529 members and 2,239 workers, 679 (31 per cent) of whom are nursing staff.

The Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS), guided by the aim to become more efficient and effective at managing Economic Benefits, has implemented online services to enable a beneficiary in need of eyeglasses to directly bring a prescription issued by an ophthalmologist and an identity card to an authorized optician, who then validates whether the benefit is to be granted or not.

The system verifies beforehand whether the user is eligible for the benefit or not, pending the granting or refusal of the benefit.

Improving the quality of services is an ongoing task that involves multiple dimensions such as listening to and evaluating the participants, transparency, excellence and investment in training as the main focus.

Hospitalization is an experience that involves both physical and emotional risks for the patient and family as well as institutional costs. Lowering these is the challenge of this good practice.

The portal was generated in order to provide, in a single location accessible in a secure manner (user ID and password), a range of information for various groups wanting to exchange data with the Bank Employees’ Pension Fund (Caja de Jubilaciones y Pensiones Bancarias – CJPB), namely:

Often, the interests of workers and employers are not the same, so addressing absenteeism as it relates to the health and safety of workers is an ethical and social commitment.

This good practice aims to reduce absenteeism arising from respiratory, musculoskeletal, mental and cardiac diseases, which are among the most frequent conditions among workers of the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista – CCOUM).

After implementing the differentiated care service for teenagers and young people at primary care level in 2015, the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista) considered it fundamental to strengthen the service to improve quality of life for people at this stage of their lives and, as a result, throughout their whole lives, reducing risks, chronic disease and costs to society. The approach was always to bear the rights of the young people in mind.

To ensure the sustainability of social security in the long term, it was considered strategic to promote a contributory culture, responsibility and installmental payments as a strategy, amongst other measures, such as the restructuring and computerization of the social security inspection services.

The Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social ‒ BPS) has developed measures to discourage the non-compliance of those paying social security contributions and to promptly recover debts by applying controls that discourage the adoption of irregular behaviour.

The Contributor Profiling System (Calificación Tributaria) is a model that describes each contributor as a function of the possible risks in their dealings with BPS from the time of their admission to the scheme, as derived from coefficients of trustworthiness based on their past behaviour.

This good practice presents the training programmes implemented by the Uruguayan social security institute, which have been deemed a substantial qualitative step forward. The strategic plan for 2011–2015 included in its lines of action “the development of modern human resource management policies, honing staff members’ skills and improving the working environment and occupational health in the organization”.

This good practice was introduced in 2014, based on the search for administrative solutions among health providers in Uruguay that guarantee care and coverage for specific vulnerable populations. We identified that these target groups would likely struggle to reach and access care, given that they lived far from the capital, primarily in suburban and rural areas. Moreover, beneficiaries were generally covered by the universal health-care system but worked in the informal sector.

Following an analysis of the occupational accident statistics for 2012 from the health institution of the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista), a target was set to reduce the frequency and severity of occupational accidents by at least 15 per cent. To this end, we introduced measures through the Occupational Health and Safety Commission (Comisión de Salud y Seguridad Laboral), which is made up of representatives from both trade unions and institutions.

To be more effective and efficient in the administration of economic benefits, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has implemented an automated solution to manage benefits based on the processing of information and current regulations, and providing access to benefits without requiring beneficiaries to go to customer care centers.

To obtain a benefit, the process begins with the authorized benefit provider completing the requisite information through the available Web functionalities. 

Preventing professional risks requires teamwork and network efforts. Our experience as a Mutual Fund that employs 2,233 officials and provides care services of every sort to approximately 83,000 associates indicates that it is essential to work on the continuous improvement of the promotion, prevention, and health care in the workplace.

The aim of these types of information systems is to offer an overview in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency of these actions, and provide tools for the identification and subsequent analysis in more overarching contexts of the demonstrable consequences for those at the receiving end of the action (the country's population).

These are physical spaces located in the workplace prepared and equipped to provide privacy, hygiene, and comfort to the employee during the breastfeeding stage. There, she can breastfeed the baby and/or express breast milk, to store it and extend its use. Several evidence-based scientific studies show the benefits of breastfeeding in the short, mid and long-term regarding the improvement of the population's health.

It is well known how to manage our regulations, standards, and working guidelines, but:

How do we manage knowledge that is not captured in typical documentary form, but which we systematically need to perform our work?

How do we manage our notebook of “useful facts” which we use for our work?

How do we ensure maximum access to:

In order to be more efficient and effective in detecting irregularities and fraud, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social (BPS)) has built an integrated solution based on the use of modeling techniques and predictive analysis to select taxpayers to be audited (Integrated Solution for the Selection of Cases to Monitor or Solución Integral de Selección de Casos a Fiscalizar (SISCA)).

The Bank Employees' Pension Fund (CJPB) welcomed this opportunity for improvement and entirely restructured its previous system for the collection of contributions, setting up a distance mechanism (internet) based on a secure connection. This presented a number of advantages including the elimination of transfers of cash and highly sensitive information on paper and over-the counter transactions in the presence of the public, using a distance telecommunication system (SICORE) which enables those concerned to carry out all their tasks from home or wherever they choose, via the web.

With the goal of promoting the inclusion of domestic workers in the Uruguayan social security system by incorporating technological tools that facilitate access to information and handling formalities, it proved possible to generate social awareness both among workers to claim their rights and among employers to meet their obligations.

Tackling gender-based and generational violence (Violencia Basada en Género y Generaciones – VBGG) in the health field requires cross-cutting strategies for promoting empathetic care based on a rights-based approach to victims. This good practice began in 2007 and is focused on providing care for women, children and adolescents suffering VBGG. The aim is to ensure a synergy between all institutional action and guarantee human, professional care.

The national reference center for birth defects and rare diseases (Centro de Referencia Nacional de Defectos Congénitos y Enfermedades Raras – CRENADECER) is a unit of the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS). The center for access to assistive technologies (Centro de Acceso a Tecnologías de Apoyo – CATA) is located therein, and its goal is to approach disability in a way that promotes equal opportunities in relation to technology, using computers to assist with rehabilitation.

The Support programme for teenage and young mothers is aimed at helping young women that, due to maternity and vulnerable conditions, show difficulties to continue or resume their education.

The Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social (BPS)), through the Health Services General Management, implements a system of benefits that covers over sixty young women annually, with the purpose of creating opportunities for them to develop a life project, integrating maternity, social, educational and labour inclusion.

Among other things, this practice has resulted in having specialist consultants from different fields of IT offering IT management expertise, flexibility and efficiency. Since its inception, none of the technology deployed has been discontinued early due to unexpected results or been deemed inadequate.

The pre-billing service has been in operation since 2001, allowing companies to make their payroll declarations electronically and, by the same means, and at the time of submission receive the calculation of their mandatory liabilities in a secure environment.

The benefits offered by this new service are as follows:

• Tax certainty for taxpayers.
• Improved quality of the Single Register of Earnings and Contributions.
• Fraud reduction.

Since 1993, the Bank Employees’ Pension Fund (Caja de Jubilaciones y Pensiones Bancarias – CJPB) has been providing “Support Sessions for the Retirement Process” with the participation of thousands of members.

The event targets members and their partners who have recently retired or are approaching the end of their working life, in order to help them in their retirement process and assist in the development of a “Second Life Plan” through workshops that promote personal development and generate rewarding, productive and healthy daily routines.