BUSINESS PROBLEM
One of the largest Financial Services firms in the U.S. was taking steps to offer institutional and individual customers a wider range of financial products and services. They sought to provide personalized advice and education to help investors make sound financial decisions.
To deliver optimal benefits, the firm initiated a shift to a modern and flexible plan-based retirement recordkeeping system.
Platform transitions are a highly complex and challenging process that can lead to transaction delays and service shortfalls.
Agility in response to issues and ensuring a positive customer experience is of the utmost importance to our Client.
Adjustments are inherent in plan and participant account administration, whenever the plan administration team deems it necessary to post a financial transaction “as of” with the date being prior to the last dividend date, the dividend payments must be adjusted. Anytime the share balance within a dividend period changes then the dividends need to be reversed and reposted accordingly.
Adjustments are inherent in plan administration in a manual OmniPlus environment. This is key to minimize financial exposure to the participants.
The three (3) primary reasons for the ongoing manual dividend adjustments were:
1. Manual financial transactions that result in a change of the share balance errors
2. Client requests for the post-dated transaction (payouts)
3. The manner of processing premiums leads to the backdating of the premium to match the date the funds reach the Client
OUR SOLUTION
Our Project Integration Team worked with the Clients’ Institutional Operations Management Group to understand their outsourcing needs for this very important business service.
We collaborated with Operations Management to create a project plan and establish appropriate workflows and relationships then validated the required team structure, roles, responsibilities, competencies, and experiences required to meet expectations and goals.
We proposed and configured a consulting team possessing the required knowledge, experiences, competencies, and skills and then deployed the team onsite, co-located with the operations servicing teams.
Enterprise Iron successfully provided important remediation services for our Clients’ high-profile institutional customers.
Most of the project activities required investigation, correction, and quality assurance at the transaction level of detail.
Other project activities included reporting the outcome of complex issues, such as “global bulk fixes” (initiated by a business unit and accommodated by IT) by institutional customers as a result of plan sponsors’ due diligence over operational controls, timeliness, the accuracy of transaction processing, process effectiveness and the completeness of platform transition.
Project deliverables included the receipt, investigation, and adjustment of the transactions included in daily reporting that reflect any required adjustment impacting dividends.
RESULTS & CLIENT BENEFITS
Our Team remediated concerns and “turned down the temperature” thereby satisfying several dozen institutional plan sponsors and their auditors.
Our Client succeeded in defining and implementing an operations management methodology and practices for providing dividend adjustment services complete with standards for:
- Scoping the project, methods, and deliverables
- Defining the approach to problem resolution
- Managing expectations of the plan provider, institutional customer/plan sponsor, and auditors
- Adjusting and correcting the dividend adjustment files
- Successfully eliminating the backlog
- Allowing the plan provider to transition back to normal operations