If you ask someone in the reconciliation department for TIAA-CREF about the good old days they may snap back at you, You mean when we reconciled thousands of accounts manually and never had the time to get around to the ones where we had discrepancies? Those good old days? You may get the idea TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund) employees dont wish for a return to those good old days. John Dominguez, director of treasury operations for the financial services company, gives the weather report, Our users were initially chilly towards the product, but theyve warmed up after using the system for a while.

With thousands of monthly transactions, Dominguez said TIAA-CREF set a goal of automating the reconciliation process. One of the first steps they took was to examine the possibility of building a system internally. It was rejected. It would have taken a lot of resources and a year to build, Dominguez said. Instead, the decision was made to find a software solution on the market.

Dominguez said the first step was to form a team made up of a half-dozen members of the reconciliation department to examine the options. This was eventually expanded to between 15 and 20 TIAA-CREF employees, including representatives from systems, auditing, and senior management. An initial group of three vendors was cut to two for the final presentation before CheckFree and its RECON-Plus product was selected. Their solution satisfied our needs for improved timeliness, automation, security, reasonable hardware and software requirements, and was reasonably priced, Dominguez said. Their reputation as a leader in electronic solutions also aided our decision-making process.

From the beginning of the selection process until installation was complete took a little over five months, according to Dominguez. He said the process could have been shortened to three months, had not TIAA-CREF also decided to simultaneously upgrade its ledger system with software from PeopleSoft. That was a monumental task on its own, Dominguez said. But we were able to resolve all the issues. Timing is everything.

TIAA-CREF has about three-fourths of its accounts currently operating under the RECON-Plus system and Dominguez said the software has satisfied the needs of the company. It has improved timeliness measures on a consistent basis, he said. We are just now starting to see some savings. The initial effort has been to get the old accounts on the system, but now TIAA-CREF is studying problem areas of its reconciliation process and focusing on correcting them.

Weve been able to reduce our temporary staff significantly, Dominguez said. Once we begin to reconcile the problem areas well be able to reduce the temporary staff even more.

The biggest problem the company had with the new system was an inability to recreate a reconciliation as of a specific date, due to the purging of matched records. CheckFree has addressed that issue and made changes in the current upgrade, Dominguez said.

He said the users experienced some sluggishness in the system, but Dominguez said he felt some of the blame should be placed on TIAA-CREFs internal configuration. The company is currently upgrading to the Windows 2000 operating system and Dominguez feels responses will be quicker when that upgrade is completed. We still have the project team running as we upgrade Windows, he said.

Things couldnt be going much better, according to Dominguez. Were starting to bring some of our outsourced accounts back in-house, he said.

The good old days are gone at TIAA-CREF. Some people there are saying, Good riddance. ROBERT REGIS HYLE

THE PROBLEM: AUTOMATE THE RECONCILIATION PROCESS FOR ITS ACCOUNTS.

THE COMPANY: TIAA-CREF

LINES: LIFE INSURANCE, ANNUITIES, AND LONG TERM CARE

ASSETS MANAGED: $274 BILLION

THE SOFTWARE: RECON-PLUS FOR WINDOWS FROM CHECKFREE

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