French people abroad: What does the project to pool retirement databases within the European Union consist of?
Stéphane Bonnet: This project aims to enable a person who has worked in several European countries to be able to bring together via a single platform all the elements they need to assert their retirement rights. This is what exists on a national scale in France: when you go to the retirement info site, a service allows you to collect all the career elements that you may have had in different retirement plans. The idea is to do the same thing at the level of the European Union. Since 2003, French law has established an individual right for policyholders to be informed about their retirement. It’s a sort of European retirement right to information that we are building.
How will this service work?
Until now, expatriates or cross-border workers had to make multiple requests to all the countries in which they had worked in order to regain their retirement rights, an often long and tedious process. From now on, the person concerned will be able to connect to a dedicated portal called FYP – Europe (Find your Pension) and declare the countries in which they have worked. There will then be an automatic collection system which will collect the career data of the person who has authenticated from the international bases of these different countries and everything will be presented to them in a single operation.
Which countries are affected by this project?
It was the European Union which launched, in 2019, a call for projects for countries wishing to test the pooling of their databases. Four volunteered: Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. In 2022, seeing that this project was on track, France integrated it, giving it technical credibility. At European level, we have the most successful, complete and qualitative retirement information system. It’s been about fifteen years since we centralized our 35 pension plans within the same system, which is not yet the case in many countries. The degree of progress of countries on this subject is quite variable, and this is what determines the time it will take them to join the system. Data relating to Belgium is already available on FYP, because they developed the portal. By the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025, France will be added to the European portal and the same goes for the Netherlands. Germany is expected to join during 2025 or early 2026, followed by Sweden.
Could other countries join this project?
We are in the process of “recruiting” new countries to broaden the spectrum of countries that will be covered. We particularly targeted Luxembourg and Switzerland, where there are a lot of cross-border workers. We have committed to the European Commission that at least seven countries will be available on the European platform within five years.
