The Flex Income Plan (FIP) by SD Worx is today a firmly established name in the Belgian HR landscape. What began as an innovative concept for flexible compensation grew into a mature platform used by more than one hundred and fifty thousand employees. With FIP, SD Worx is the market leader in flexible compensation.
For nearly a decade, Teal Partners has contributed to the development, improvement, growth and ongoing support of FIP. Not as a supplier of individual features, but as a technical partner that grows along with the complexity of the platform and its users.
Flexible compensation is gaining importance. More and more employers are opting for it. Legislation around pay is constantly changing, and the possibilities for flexible compensation keep expanding. This translates into a wide variety of budgets that can be deployed flexibly, and numerous benefits that can be chosen.
The more flexibility, the greater the complexity on both the software and HR side. The need for digital support grows with that complexity. Whatever the user chooses or changes must be translated correctly into payroll immediately. The increasing number of users has an effect on performance and stability.
For SD Worx, that meant a clear challenge: how do you offer clients a platform for flexible compensation that is extremely flexible and user-friendly, while at the same time remaining scalable and performant?
When the development of FIP came to Teal Partners in the autumn of 2017, a functioning foundation was already in place. The developers did not start from a blank slate, but they did design a new architecture. The core concepts remained intact — employee, budgets, benefits — but the processes around them were rethought to enable a continuous cycle. Employees no longer had to lock in their choices once a year, but could spend their budget on an ongoing basis in a 'continuous shop'.
With a small, fixed team of experienced developers, Teal Partners built out the platform, modernized it, and supported SD Worx with new needs. Over the years, the focus shifted from building to maintaining: delivering new features where needed, but equally guaranteeing continuity, optimizing performance and providing support for complex cases.
On the technology side, the choice was made for a stable and future-oriented stack, with Angular for the frontend, .NET Core for the backend and Azure as infrastructure. Legacy components were gradually modernized, without jeopardizing continuity for clients.
Scalability was achieved not only through the chosen infrastructure, but also by continuously improving code quality and data models, along with a permanent focus on performance.
An important point of attention was configuration. The strength of FIP lies in its flexibility, but it is precisely that flexibility that is challenging to configure and maintain. Together with SD Worx, work was done on refining configuration models, so that consultants and support teams can set up and follow up on the platform efficiently, even with large and complex clients.
Today, FIP supports more than 600 employers and 150,000 employees. Over the past year, more than 200 new clients were onboarded. The platform processes large volumes of transactions daily and remains performant, even under peak load and with complex pay configurations.
SD Worx manages the substantive pay logic and client setup; Teal Partners is responsible for architecture, code quality, performance and security.
What we are most proud of is that the platform has been running stably for years while the number of users and transactions has increased substantially.
Sarah Wuyts, FIP developer at Teal Partners since 2018
Proven scale and stability
FIP has been running in production for years with large numbers of users and remains performant under growing load.
Flexibility tailored to compensation policy
Employers can configure their cafeteria plan in fine detail within a secure, robust and manageable framework. Sector agreements and collective labor agreements (CLAs) make the options extremely diverse.
Strong integrations
Extensive connections with payroll and benefit providers ensure correct and smooth follow-up of the choices employees make from the central solution. The platform connects seamlessly with external partners.
Easily maintainable
The platform is built to grow along with legislation, new benefits, new integrations with benefit providers, and changing needs.
Transparent and user-friendly for employees
Employees get a clear view of their options and can select benefits that fit their situation from a single central environment.
Reliable for HR and employers
HR teams can rely on correct processing, watertight follow-up, and a platform that automatically monitors complex rules.
Smart budget management
FIP doesn't just look at one fixed pot, but takes into account different budget sources, legal possibilities, and recurring or one-off budgets. This way, employees get more out of their available budget, without it causing financial or administrative problems later on.
Secure in a sensitive context
Because FIP works with payroll data, personal data and financial choices, security, monitoring and control are built into the way the platform is developed and managed.
The strength of this collaboration lies in the long term. According to Annick De Cock, Business Unit Manager Advisory at SD Worx, the added value of Teal Partners lies not only in technical expertise, but above all in the way the team thinks along.
"The developers are always willing to think things through together: how are we going to solve this, what is needed here, which solution is sensible in the long term? The combination of involvement and common sense makes the difference."
That is crucial when building a platform like Flex Income Plan, where legal, fiscal, technical and user-oriented choices come together in a platform that has been growing for ten years.
"I appreciate that Teal Partners challenges us," says Annick. "Sometimes a client asks for something, but that's not necessarily the best solution. Then it's valuable to have a partner at the table who does more than simply execute."
In this way, Flex Income Plan has been able to grow sustainably: from a pioneering product to a platform at scale, where stability and performance are crucial.
"Of course, domain knowledge is essential, and it's there. But what I find at least as important is that Teal Partners thinks about the best solution, without building something that looks impressive on paper but later becomes unmaintainable. They go along with the growth of a product: from pioneering phase to scale, stability and further professionalization. That, for me, is the great added value."
The Flex Income Plan by SD Worx allows employers to offer flexible compensation to their employees. Employees receive a budget with which they themselves purchase the benefits they want, from a mobile phone to vacation days. In this way, employees can tailor their compensation package to their individual preferences and life stage. With more than six hundred clients and one hundred and fifty thousand employees, FIP is one of the most mature cafeteria platforms on the Belgian market.
