E/W Group: PERKS: Choose PERKS™ to administer all retirement products

With the nation’s baby boomers nearing their retirement years, the retirement savings industry is experiencing rapid growth. Equity-based products are the mainstays of retirement plans, since equities have provided solid long-term growth for decades. However, processing equities includes numerous challenges that only a high-performance, multi-level system can handle.

To effectively administer your clients’ equity-based products, you need a system that facilitates each step of processing. You want an enterprise-wide system that:

Supports all aspects of plan and participant administration.
Manages on a single engine all types of retirement products, from variable annuities and variable life to 401K and mutual fund products.
Offers Web-enabled delivery for easy access by your clients, participants and producers.
Integrates all functions on a single application to enable hands-free straight through processing (STP) from the field to your back-office.

PERKS Is a Robust Equity-Products Administration Engine

E/W Group and efSolutions have partnered to offer a powerful engine to administer all of your equity-based products on one system.  This comprehensive application administers both the wealth accumulation and payout phases, so you don’t have to transfer policies to another system when your clients desire distributions.

Employing the latest technology, PERKS, the Participant Equity-based Record Keeping System, consolidates policy and account administration on a single application.  It enables straight through processing (STP) from the moment you enter the application through to reporting and accounting.

PERKS, which was developed in conjunction with our clients who live in the marketplace, is a flexible, multi-tiered, client-server application.  It is scalable and data source independent, facilitating easy information retrieval from the relational database using a Windows-based PC, a Web browser, or electronic data interface (EDI).  The user-friendly application is programmed using object-oriented technology, making it trouble-free to operate and maintain.  Even your staff without programming experience can modify products or add new ones easily.

The system’s Web-enabled delivery offers a common interface for your home office personnel, distribution forces, and clients.  Depending on what you authorize, all system data can be available to all interested individuals, including clients.  The Internet-based technology enables your users or customers to access real-time database information from any location.  Clients can customize information and preferences and take advantage of market data links.

Your retirement business is highly regulated.  The PERKS rules-based system incorporates many state and federal regulations, so your staff need not know every jurisdiction’s rules to process new business from any state you do business in.

PERKS Supports All Your Processing Essentials

Plan Management: New policies and contracts as well as terminations are processed at this level.  PERKS is flexible enough to handle an unlimited number of funds sources, and both tax-qualified and nonqualified plans.  Record keeping includes plan identification, plan processing rules, and a plan calendar specifying valid processing days.

Participant Administration: The system’s capabilities include both individual and group processing for true or associated groups.  Processing for the participant, policy or account, source of funds, and asset holding are supported.  You can also establish schedules to automate processing of non-financial events particular to each account.

Financial Activity: Contributions, withdrawals, surrenders, transfers and exchanges are administered at this level.  All financial scheduled events are supported, including dollar cost averaging, asset re-balancing, withdrawals, benefits payments, fee deductions, and loan and insurance processing.  Other financial activity capabilities include daily pricing activity and batch processing of financial events.  Processing results are funneled to your general ledger, as well as custodian and money manager systems.

Reporting: PERKS produces accurate and timely records for every type of retirement plan.  Its relational database makes it convenient to manipulate data for any type of report you desire.  Clients, producers or users may view policy or account values online.

Plan and participant reporting are administered on separate levels.  The system issues transaction confirmations, quarterly and annual statements, and generates tax forms in accordance with Internal Revenue Service regulations.  On the plan level, system reports include daily activity journals and a daily activity summary, daily buy/sell reports and fund trading reports, periodic financial reports, and series 5500 reporting.

Accounting and Financial Reporting: The system interfaces with your general ledger to process all reports your organization needs, including account reconciliation.  All reports for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service, and state regulators are supported, as are semi-annual financial reports and performance reporting.

A Powerful Administration System

The Participant Equity-based Record Keeping System meets your need for an integrated system to manage all your equity-based retirement products, enabling you to maximize productivity.  Created through a partnership between efSolutions and E/W Group, the system’s unified technical environment inherently supports straight through processing.  The development staff of efSolutions and E/W Group is made up of financial services specialists with years of experience in securities firms and financial services software companies.  We are committed to designing business applications that ensure our clients’ financial success from implementation throughout the expansion of their businesses.  As the industry continues to change, we will modify and enhance the system to meet new requirements, thus ensuring our clients’ financial success.