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Over the past several years one of the largest financial services firms in the United States took steps to offer institutional and individual clients a wider range of financial products and services, along with personalized advice and education to help investors 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. Platform transition is always a challenging process; bumps in the transition road often lead 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 to industry standard platform solution represents the challenge to the Firm. The ideal team members have the competency to analyze reported issues and undertake requested research anywhere across the domain of the: legacy system; conversion process; new system; and post conversion production transaction processing. Within this domain team members would need to: validate; report; and remedy any given transition issue. Team resources would be experienced in auditing, accounting, treasury, trust, record keeping, plan administration, project management, quality control and quality assurance. The selected team would assist the Firm in the Firm’s production facilities and be self managed. Integrate the capabilities of the remediation team described above into production operations for institution client services to respond to:

• High profile remediation for one-up issues
• Large institutional client requests for pre/post conversion reconciliation of assets, handling of premiums, plan enrollment, and investment allocation changes
• Process effectiveness for post conversion transaction processing

Enterprise Iron (EI) worked with the Firm’s Institutional Operations Management Group to understand the Firms needs for resourcing this important business service. 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 Firms’ expectations. EI proposed and configured a consulting team possessing all the required knowledge, experiences, competencies and skills and placed the team onsite in January, 2007. Since arriving onsite the team has successfully provided many important remediation services for high-profile institutional clients of the firm. To date, most projects required investigating, correcting, reconciliation and reporting outcomes of complex issues registered by institutional customers as a result of plan sponsors’ due diligence over operational controls, timeliness and accuracy of transaction processing, process effectiveness and completeness of platform transition. Project deliverables included detailed research artifacts supporting research validation and recommendation conclusions, project summary reports defining project scope, goals and deliverables and any data files (text, xml, excel and/or databases) resulting as an outcome of the project.

In addition to satisfying and calming several 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 Firm and institutional client / plan sponsor expectation; and successfully concluding a remediation project.