UNLOCKING THE CORE – A MODERN APPROACH TO INNOVATION AND AI

Retirement professionals are addressing considerable pressures from consolidation, shrinking margins and reduced fees. Alongside this, aging populations and shifts in intergenerational wealth transfer are driving demand for personalized, digital-first experiences. Providers need to balance scale, efficiency, compliance and tailored engagement.

But they also want to integrate new product types, ancillary services and participant-centric solutions to drive growth and deliver compelling client experiences and improved outcomes. And to protect their businesses and participants, they must ensure agile responses to regulatory changes and cybersecurity risks.

Providers are exploring new ways to unlock their platforms, modernizing them for emerging technologies and laying the groundwork for future enablement. Front of mind is harnessing AI, producing data-driven insights, expanding the ecosystem and personalizing the participants’ experience.

Which elements define a modern retirement platform today? These are the new essentials:

• Better outcomes for both clients and participants
• Ability to innovate
• AI readiness
• Advanced data and analytics capabilities
• Ease of integration
• Speed to market

Whether you’re modernizing your retirement platform in-house or choosing a partner to help, ask yourself: Can you evolve that platform without compromising scale, resilience and the experience of participants, plan sponsors and intermediaries?

Unlocking the Core’s Value: Progressive Insulation

Modernization is not a one-and-done, finite event but a journey. It’s a progressive approach requiring continuous investment, refinement and innovation from the technology partner firm. Doing it well enables AI-based operational capabilities, data-driven insights, personalized experiences and space for future innovation.

Whichever technology a servicing platform is using—whether cloud, a mainframe or another solution—isn’t what impacts modernization success. The first priority is to ensure that your platform can do what it does best while staying secure and scalable. Optimum modernization then springs from how effectively you can innovate around that core system, where capabilities like APIs, data access and insights, AI, ecosystem integration and digital experiences can be activated.

The result is a continual system evolution that doesn’t sacrifice the core’s stability or flexibility. Enhancements and new products can be integrated seamlessly by using well-governed, secure APIs, replicating domain data into modern stores and delivering cloud native experiences around—not inside—the servicing platform.

We call this progressive insulation. It delivers maximum future scalability as the nucleus of the “platform” is reduced to the core registry system with a series of flexible, componentized add-on capabilities that can be easily connected. By working from the “outside-in,” this core becomes a stable surface on which to safely introduce new options, like financial wellness and retirement intelligence programs, retirement rollover, income portability and advisor practice management.

The servicing platform must be ready to evolve at each point where users, clients, participants, sponsors and intermediaries can interact with it. It helps providers and record-keepers leverage the power of their data across the enterprise and smooths the path to AI-based operational capabilities, resulting in reduced operational complexity.

AI-driven outcomes: Faster, Simpler, Less Risky

AI is dramatically changing the modernization equation. Historically, many of the arguments against servicing platforms centered around integration complexity, development speed and the cost of change. AI is removing disparities and permitting access to new capabilities by accelerating engineering, testing, data modeling, automation and integration.

AI helps firms unlock their legacy systems to achieve the scale, resilience and reliability of the old with the speed and intelligence of the new. Capabilities that previously couldn’t be accessed or that necessitated extensive, tailored development are now accelerated through AI-assisted engineering, testing, data modeling and automation.

But even AI needs direction and guidance. This is where technical expertise and domain expertise intersect. The ability to take practical business-specific knowledge and use it to train, shape and accelerate AI-driven outcomes can amplify and truly accelerate results. Leading industry analysts endorse an incremental, insulated modernization approach, among them Forrester, whose research shows that leaders are integrating core systems with modern technologies so that each element can do what it does best. Gartner supports pragmatic platform modernization using phased strategies. And Kyndryl’s recent market survey indicates that organizations are adapting, not abandoning, their servicing platforms —shifting strategies, lowering modernization costs, and expecting higher return on investment in doing so.

A Flexible, De-Risked Strategy

Insulating the core is the approach we take at SS&C. We’re harnessing our technology’s proven value and its scalable, tested and trusted capabilities and evolving the model around that technology to deliver a modern experience for participants, advisors and sponsors. Fundamentally, this minimizes risk and disruption while maximizing participant outcomes and experiences.

Our ecosystem contains all the essential components of plan administration and recordkeeping, transaction processing, participant servicing, compliance and testing capabilities and more. These co-exist with digital engagement capabilities like participant web portals and mobile apps for account management and planning, plan sponsor portals for payroll and reporting, advisor and third-party administrator portals and tools. It also integrates with other solutions like financial wellness, retirement income, rollover portability and retirement intelligence. We deliver these through various service models ranging from SaaS to full business process outsourcing arrangement—or anything in between—using our hybrid, á la carte service model.

The result is a full, interconnected and flexible ecosystem that helps retirement professionals drive more efficient processes, streamline critical functions and implement a flexible platform for growth. And because we’ve designed a modular model that is primed to take on new capabilities at any time, we can swiftly integrate new functionalities across the retirement value chain. Clients receive holistic service experiences and can interact with us in real time through user interfaces and systems. And our solutions can integrate with any modern asset management, wealth, retirement or insurance record-keeping system.

Evolving For Responsiveness and Relevance

We believe success belongs to organizations that combine the scale and resilience of the old world with the speed and intelligence of the new. Modernizing the retirement platform is not a one-time initiative—it’s an ongoing journey embedded within the product development lifecycle.

When assessing the true integrity of a modern retirement platform, don’t just consider the technology stack. Examine its ability to continually deliver innovation and positive business outcomes at scale in an increasingly complex environment.

Watch our video to learn more about the future of retirement servicing platforms and SS&C Retirement Solutions' modernization strategy.