Helping the Bavarian Government provide rapid financial support in a time of crisis

“I would like to thank Pegasystems and T-Systems for their extremely high level of commitment to helping businesses in need get the support they need more quickly.”

The Business Issue

Faced with a significant challenge as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs had to find a way to efficiently manage incoming applications for financial relief from small to medium-sized businesses.

The existing manual application process required applicants to complete, scan, and email PDF documents to the application centers, then wait for administrative staff to manually go through and approve the claims. This led to a considerable lag between applications and the distribution of the funds, which, at a time of crisis, was too long.

The Solution

Using the Pega Platform’s highly configurable low-code capabilities, the Bavarian government was able to create a fully digitized application process in just five days. The Bavarian government worked closely with Pega and its partner, Greenfield Technology Aktiengesellschaft, to record, test, and implement the specific requirements of the online application process.

The application was hosted in secure, scalable data centers from T-Systems, allowing for both the application and the processing of claims to be sped up considerably. Once approved, payment orders are automatically forwarded to the relevant administrative staff of the Free State of Bavaria and the City of Munich, before a payment notification is generated and received by the approved business via email.

The Results

The application revolutionized the way the Bavarian government managed claims for COVID-19 financial aid:

• More than 300,000 applicants were able to get financial aid amounting to EUR 2.2 billion within several weeks of the system going live
• Government staff were able to continue processing applications at their home workstations whilst still adhering to social distancing regulations
• Two other departments within the Bavarian government have used the same technology to launch their own aid programs to provide financial support to freelance artists and process compensation payments for parents who have lost earnings through having to bear the responsibility of childcare

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