EIFIS Guest

Over the past several years one of the largest insurance firms in the United States took steps to offer its institutional defined contribution retirement plan clients a wider range of financial products and services, along with personalized advice and education to help individual employees make sound financial decisions.  To deliver these and other benefits, the firm initiated a shift to a more modern and flexible plan-based retirement record-keeping system.  Their transition to the new platform was a challenging process; bumps in the transition road often led to transaction delays and other service shortfalls.  Quickly responding to transition issues and assuring a positive customer experience is of utmost importance to this firm.

Finding and on-boarding a self managed team of experienced resources to immediately respond to customer needs relative to plan transition from a home-grown legacy system to an industry standard platform solution represented the challenge to the firm.

Develop and integrate a specialized team charged with identifying and correcting errors in client accounts as well as reconciliation of all outstanding cash and records items stemming from the platform conversion.  Integrate the activities of this specialized remediation team into production operations for client services to respond to: 

• High profile remediation for hot client issues
• Large institutional client requests for pre/post conversion reconciliation of assets
• Improved process effectiveness for post conversion transaction processing

The selected team would assist the client in its production facilities and be self-managed.  The client was seeking individuals who would analyze reported issues and undertake requested research that spanned the legacy system, conversions and transaction processing. 

EI collaborated with operations management to create a project plan and establish appropriate relationships.  EI validated the required team structure, roles, responsibilities, competencies and experiences required to meet the firm’s expectations.  EI proposed and configured a consulting team possessing skills in auditing, accounting, treasury, trust, record keeping, plan administration, project management, quality control and quality assurance.

Most projects required investigating, correcting, reconciling and reporting outcomes of complex issues registered by institutional customers as a result of the client’s due diligence reviews of operational controls, timeliness and accuracy of transaction processing, process effectiveness and completeness of platform transition.

In addition to restoring confidence among institutional plan sponsors, the firm succeeded in defining and implementing a back-office business operational methodology and practice for providing high-profile issue remediation services complete with standards for: approaching problems, defining project scope and deliverables, managing the firm’s and institutional client’s / plan sponsor’s expectation, and successfully concluding a remediation project.