TIAA-CREF is teaming up with Accenture in a bid to modernize its retirement record-keeping business, TIAA announced in a news release Aug. 27.
As part of the strategic partnership, Accenture will support parts of the TIAA’s record-keeping operations to make them more efficient through automation and enhanced processes, the news release said.
Accenture will begin to provide the support in 2025.
“We are leveraging Accenture as a strategic partner in transforming our record-keeping technology and operations,” said Sastry Durvasula, chief information and client services officer at TIAA, in an interview. “Being a hundred-year-old company, we continuously work hard to modernize our technology and digital capabilities and drive it to the next level.”
TIAA, however, will continue to “own” the record-keeping platform, client-facing responsibilities and the overall “onus of record-keeping,” he said.
Kourtney Gibson, senior executive vice president and chief institutional client officer at TIAA, underscored the point, saying that TIAA will retain full responsibility for retirement plans and record-keeping services as well as hosting and safeguarding plan data on its platforms. She also added that TIAA will continue to be responsible for all aspects of relationships with plan sponsors, their employees, and plan consultants.
“When we think about the relationships with our plan sponsors and individual participants, they will start and stop with us,” Gibson said.
TIAA anticipates the partnership will result in new digital capabilities and artificial intelligence-enabled tools for TIAA relationship managers and plan consultants. It also expects to see new capabilities that will help plan participants create a more secure future through new digital features.
“We are really looking to reimagine how it is that we make doing business with TIAA easier and more enjoyable for the people that we serve,” Gibson said.
As part of the partnership, some 1,500 TIAA employees in the U.S. and India will be moving to Accenture. Half of the employees being offered positions are in the U.S. and the other half in India, Durvasula said, adding that they will primarily support TIAA’s back-end record-keeping operations.
In addition, several senior leaders have been offered and already accepted positions with Accenture.
“We believe this partnership will take our record-keeping capabilities to a very different level, especially in the age of AI, and set us up for the next century,” Durvasula said.
