Delivering Aurora: Building XPS’s Pensions Administration Platform

We were part of the team that helped deliver Aurora, the pensions administration platform developed by XPS Pension Administrators and launched in 2023. Our NDA limits what we can disclose about internal design decisions, but much can be said about the platform’s context, purpose and public footprint — and, importantly, how we worked with XPS to realise it.

Understanding XPS Pension Administrators

XPS Group is one of the UK’s largest specialist pensions consultancies and administrators, listed on the FTSE 250. It provides a full range of services including actuarial, investment, governance, and pensions administration.

Over 1,300 pension scheme clients
Administers pensions for more than one million members
Operates across 15 UK locations
Appointed by schemes with assets over £1 billion
Listed as a £340M+ market cap firm on the London Stock Exchange
(XPS Group – About Us, HL.co.uk Company Info)

In 2025, XPS was appointed to run administration for the Metropolitan Police Service Pension Scheme, marking its largest public sector contract to date (Research Tree).

Aurora: What’s Publicly Known

Aurora is a proprietary administration platform developed to support XPS’s growing client base and streamline scheme management at scale. It was described in XPS’s 2023 Preliminary Results as a key milestone in its technology roadmap, designed to improve operational efficiency and client experience.

Two notable implementations of Aurora have been made public:

SEI Master Trust: Approximately 140,000 members transitioned onto Aurora in 2025 as XPS took on full administration responsibilities. (Pensions Expert)
Metropolitan Police Service Scheme: XPS’s appointment to this public sector scheme further highlights Aurora’s capacity to handle complex, high-volume administration. (Research Tree)

These references reinforce Aurora’s role as a core operational platform.

Our Contribution to Aurora

We were brought in during the early phases of Aurora’s development, when XPS’s internal tech team was still small and the platform vision was taking shape. Our focus was to help design and deliver a system that could scale, evolve, and reflect the operational complexity of real pension schemes.

How We Worked

Iterative delivery
We focused on delivering working improvements in short cycles — usable features that added visible value early and often.
Fact finding and collaboration
We ran in-depth sessions with subject-matter experts and administrators, often working through real cases in live pairing sessions. This close collaboration meant we could build functionality that was relevant, robust, and grounded in how things actually worked.
Frequent demonstration
Rapid demo loops helped us check progress regularly, adapt to changing requirements, and keep delivery transparent.
Capability building
Alongside engineering work, we supported hiring, onboarding and mentoring of the internal XPS development team — helping to build sustainable in-house capability.

Engineering Approach

While we won’t go into specifics, the platform’s architecture reflects well-established principles applied to a high-regulation, high-complexity domain:

Workflow first
We established patterns to manage complexity and performance and treat the management of business workflows as a first-class concern.
Operation at scale
We ensured the platform leveraged the benefits of well established technologies to remain performant even under peak load.
Developer tools for real-world use
We introduced structured, autoamted workflows to allow safe and governed extension of business rules.

A Platform in Active Use

Aurora now handles the core administration for several major schemes and supports over a million members. As XPS continues to grow, Aurora forms the technology backbone of its operations — a position confirmed in company statements and client case studies.

What began as a focused consulting brief evolved into a long-term collaboration — one where we helped deliver one of the most capable administration platforms in the UK pensions market.

References

Image courtesy of Spaces, design partners for XPS’s office environment.