Edison, NJ September 4, 2008 - TekFinancial Solutions® Retirement Services Practice recently celebrated its three year anniversary delivering value-added solutions within the Defined Benefit (DB) and Defined Contribution (DC) workspace. Tekmark® Global Solutions LLC (Tekmark), one of the largest privately-held IT consulting companies in the U.S., created the TekFinancial Solutions division to focus on the Financial Services vertical, including retirement services. Over three years ago, Guy Del Grande, president of Tekmark, instituted a business plan to make TekFinancial Solutions Retirement Services Practice one of the leading consulting firms within the DB/DC arena. TekFinancial Solutions is well on its way to accomplishing that goal. Since its inception, the Retirement Services Practice has completed a multitude of client engagements and has many currently underway. Overviews of several significant client engagements are presented below.
Within the first year, Ken Smyth, Vice President of IT Solutions at Tekmark, hired Patrick Garon and Stephen McPhail to develop its Retirement Services consulting practice. Patrick and Stephen are recognized experts in the Retirement Services market. Within the first three months, TekFinancial Solutions was asked to bid on and was awarded a large OmniPlus upgrade. This upgrade consisted of not only upgrading from one OmniPlus release to another, but also included a complete revision of 65,000 OmniPlus text-files, hundreds of custom Cobol programs, and a major rewrite of the majority of the front-end applications. Additionally, TekFinancial Solutions implemented at least 15 major cost savings process enhancements; the client will enjoy those cost-cutting benefits for years to come.
Capitalizing on this early success, the Retirement Services Practice's next major project was a cost analysis exercise to determine the feasibility of installing a new release versus defining a custom solution to meet tomorrow's plan administration requirements. TekFinancial Solutions developed cost/benefit return-on-investment models that are transferable from one project to another. As result of this market-leading analysis, TekFinancial Solutions was able to develop a custom solution that resulted in saving nearly 3,400 staff-hours.
Based on TekFinancial Solutions' outstanding reputation within the market place, they successfully completed an extensive competitive review process and were awarded one of the largest conversion projects of 2007/2008. TekFinancial Solutions was given the challenge to convert a firm's top 75 clients, with over 10 billion dollars in assets, from one platform to another as a result of a large acquisition. This conversion was unique in that it required transparency to the firm's customers while causing no undue hardships to their current business and recordkeeping operations. Not only did TekFinancial Solutions complete this project, but it exceeded all of the firm's expectations by delivering the project ahead of schedule and within budget.
Most recently, the Retirement Services Practice undertook a project with a large financial services firm to assist in implementing pieces of the Pension Protection Act legislation. With assets over $550 billion, this diversified international firm is one of the premier providers of financial services in each of its markets. Project support included implementing Auto Increase Functionality and Automatic Enrollment. Additionally, the practice assisted the firm in rolling out Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) rules-based services and advised the client on techniques and solutions in aligning data warehouse implementations designed to work with the SunGard OmniPlus legacy recordkeeping applications. By architecting the data warehouse and leveraging both scheduled data extracts along with real-time data transfers, TekFinancial Solutions was able to help the client realize the possibility of using Web 2.0 technologies hand-in-hand with their current SunGard Web applications.
Currently, the Retirement Services Practice is engaged on numerous projects, including assisting one of the largest financial services firms with total retirement assets under management of over $90 billion with an entire platform and data center migration as well as a recordkeeping release upgrade. The practice is also engaged with a client in transforming terabytes of data mining reports into usable end client reports and working with several other clients in developing and supporting legacy Web-based applications.
"The projects we've been involved with over the last 3 years have repeatedly allowed us to successfully employ collaborative consulting and forge partnerships with clients at a level that I've not seen in over 14 years in this space," said Patrick Garon, Practice Director.
These success stories describe a sampling of the accomplishments TekFinancial Solutions has enjoyed over the last three years. If you would like to learn more about TekFinancial Solutions' thought leadership, subject matter expertise, and real-world experience in the Retirement Services arena that it can offer your firm or if you have a particular staffing augmentation need, please contact the solutions team at (732) 572-9600, ext 1 or email
retirementsvcs@tekfinancialsolutions.com
About TekFinancial Solutions
Based in Edison, New Jersey, TekFinancial Solutions, a division of Tekmark Global Solutions, LLC provides consulting services and designs, creates, secures, builds, and manages a diverse range of applications and technologies tailored to meet the individual and changing needs of its clients. TekFinancial Solutions leverages and implements the latest technologies and helps firms adapt to the market dynamics driven by globalization, consolidation, competition, regulatory changes and technology advances. TekFinancial Solutions aligns and customizes secure solutions to meet the individual business requirements of clients and implements them with speed, accuracy, and reliability.
