00:00 AM
NYS Teachers' Finds Portia a Better Fit
New York State Teachers' Retirement System is installing Thomson Investment Software's Portia portfolio management and accounting system. The Albany, New York-based public retirement plan sponsor intends to bring TIS's system into full production by June 30 to support some $62 billion - the majority of its total $76 billion in assets under management.
NYS Teachers' is rolling out TIS's flagship product and plans to bring Portia live in March. Following parallel testing with existing investment technology, officials at the plan hope to bring Portia into full production in time for the fiscal year-end functions it performs in June. NYS Teachers' is a cost-sharing, multiple-employer, public employee retirement system established to provide pension benefits for the teachers in New York state (excluding New York City).
The deployment of Portia also marks the impending departure of an incumbent system - in this scenario it's the IMS-2000 global portfolio management and accounting system from Marlton, N.J.-based QED Information Systems. The difference here, though, is that NYS Teachers' wasn't exactly dissatisfied with QED's system.
In fact, NYS Teachers' assistant finance manager, Anthony Chromczak, says his office was quite happy with the core functionality of QED and probably would not have replaced it, had it not been a Unix-based system. The plan has used QED since mid-1996.