Prudential widens retirement options

In 2000, Prudential Financial realized it could no longer manage complex 21st-century retirement schemes, a system built for handling employee pension plans of the 1960s and ‘70s. So it retired its legacy system and headed to PARIS (Plan Accounting and Reporting Information System), a Java-based application built from the ground up by Prudential’s team of in-house developers.

PARIS integrates some 20 internal and external applications to handle all aspects of plan management. Using a plug-in model, components such as fee calculators or pricing modules are added quickly, dramatically reducing the need for analysis and regression testing.

Using plug-ins also allows Prudential to upgrade the system continually as innovative new applications appear. PARIS was completed in six phases over a period of three years; at its peak, the more than $10 million project employed two project managers, five analysts, 24 developers, 10 testers, and one database analyst. Yet the project dramatically proved its worth soon after Prudential acquired CIGNA’s retirement business in 2004.

The company will be able to convert 40 years’ worth of Cigna’s legacy plans into PARIS in just nine months, says Noah Krieger, vice president of information systems. Overall, the system will reduce ongoing maintenance costs and run rate by 25 percent per year, he says. Retirement schemes may come and go, but Prudential will always have PARIS.