How Accedia Helped Alexforbes Unify Its Products in AF Connect

Who Is Alexforbes?

Alexforbes is a diversified financial services company founded in 1935, managing retirement funds, investments, insurance, and employee benefits. It generates most of its revenue in South Africa, where it plays a key role in the country's financial sector, while also maintaining operations in Botswana, Namibia, the Channel Islands, and Nigeria. In the financial year to 31 March 2026, the company grew assets under management and administration by 22% to R733 billion.

A business this size depends on a wide network of systems. Pensions, investments, insurance, claims, and member administration have each been built and maintained separately over the years. Accedia and Alexforbes have partnered for over 13 years, and AF Connect is one of the largest products they have built together. Accedia has played a key role in developing it and continues to maintain and improve it.

A Single Portal for Every Alexforbes Product

AF Connect is the portal Alexforbes clients use to reach every product the company offers in one place. Its main users are institutional clients: the companies whose members hold Alexforbes pensions, investments, and benefits.

Consolidating Investments, Funds, and Claims

For the member, AF Connect is a single view of their financial position. They can check retirement savings and other investments in real time, and open any fund to see what is vested, which transactions have run through it, and who the beneficiaries are. They can also submit and track claims, including savings withdrawals under the two-pot system.

The portal handles the tasks that once meant contacting Alexforbes directly: completing a nomination of beneficiary form, downloading statements and member booklets, or checking the value of a life and disability policy. It also includes built-in calculators for internal rate of return and goals such as a wedding or a holiday.

Built Around South Africa's Financial Rules

All of this falls under South Africa's financial and data-protection framework. AF Connect protects personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and, under the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act (FAIS Act), presents information without crossing into financial advice. When a member submits a savings-withdrawal claim, the portal treats it as a legally binding instruction under the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (ECTA).

The Complexity Behind a Single Interface

Relying on Many Independent Systems

AF Connect brings together data from the full range of Alexforbes systems and services. Each of those systems was built separately and holds its data in its own structure and format, so what reaches the portal is rarely uniform. AF Connect depends on these systems, so a fault in any one of them tends to surface in AF Connect first, leaving the portal to carry the weight of issues that begin elsewhere.

Sustaining Performance Under Load

The platform carries heavy daily traffic, so keeping it fast, accurate, and available is an ongoing requirement rather than a one-off goal. Demand is uneven and climbs at certain points in the year. The clearest example is early March, when the annual two-pot savings-withdrawal allowance resets and member activity climbs sharply.

Aligning Priorities Across Product Teams

AF Connect is the interface to every Alexforbes product, which means requests come in from teams across the business, each with its own view of where the portal should go. Those views vary, and a change requested by one team can affect another's data or layout. Bringing them into a single, coherent direction takes constant coordination.

How Accedia Builds and Maintains AF Connect

Accedia's team on AF Connect is cross-functional, spanning front-end and back-end development and design. Its developers are technical leads and subject-matter experts who know both the platform and the financial domain it serves, and Alexforbes relies on their judgment when deciding where the product goes next.

Shaping the Product's Direction

At an earlier stage of the project, Accedia's business analysts helped coordinate its direction. They took the competing requests coming in from teams across Alexforbes, gave them structure, and turned them into a clear, shared roadmap. Alongside that roadmap, they established how the project would capture requirements, organize work, and decide what to build first.

Integrating Many Systems into One Experience

This is where most of the engineering goes. The data arriving from those systems, along with a range of third-party APIs, is rarely uniform, coming in different structures, formats, and update cycles. Accedia's engineers reconcile it and transform it into a single, consistent model that the portal can present, so a member sees accurate, real-time information about their funds, claims, and investments in one clear view, with none of the underlying complexity. Keeping that information accurate and easy to read across all sources, as existing systems change and new ones are added, is the most valuable part of the work.

Continuous Research and Refinement

Accedia's team regularly runs client reviews, user interviews, and research, taking feedback directly from the members who use the portal and using it to guide the next round of improvements. That ongoing input keeps a platform this large, clear, and usable as it grows.

Technology Stack

AF Connect runs on Angular and TypeScript on the front-end and C# on the back-end, with LINQ for data access and Microsoft SQL Server storing the data. Microsoft SharePoint supports document and content management, with features like downloadable statements, booklets, and forms. A NUnit test suite supports quality and stability across releases, and continuous integration and delivery through Azure Pipelines and Azure DevOps let the team release updates regularly without taking the portal offline.

The Impact on Alexforbes and Its Members

Around 100,000 members now use AF Connect every month. The tasks that once meant logging into separate systems or contacting Alexforbes directly now sit in one place. For an institutional client administering benefits for thousands of members, that consolidation removes manual administration and the friction of moving between disconnected systems.

AF Connect has become one of the most important products in the Alexforbes offering, and the engagement behind it continues without interruption.

What Comes Next for AF Connect

AF Connect keeps growing, with more work planned on its roadmap that Accedia will be a part of. One area the team is exploring is artificial intelligence, to make the large volume of financial information on the portal easier for members to take in, in line with Alexforbes' wider adoption of AI. Accedia is also working on improving the experience across devices, with an update to the mobile app among the plans. The aim behind all of it stays consistent: to keep AF Connect the clearest, most dependable way for members to see and act on everything they hold with Alexforbes.