Dominick Franzini and Eric Burnside
Gathering data is no longer enough. In any industry, but especially among TPAs, the chief goal is charting the future – by way of enlightened data analysis. “We must be good at capturing and leveraging data to express valuable insights back to our clients,” explained Eric Burnside, chief financial officer and business development manager for Independent Retirement Consulting, a Portland, Oregon TPA firm also known as Inde. “Before PensionPro, that wasn’t as feasible. We now have plan characteristics, workflow data, and various inputs all stored in an accessible database. We look to mine that data and characterize plans in new and interesting ways for our clients and referral partners.”
It’s a game changer for firms who seek innovation. Inde implemented PensionPro to establish a firm foundation to sustain significant growth and quickly realized other advantages. “Unlike our previous software and some of the solutions we had grafted together, PensionPro speaks our language, all of the data is industry-specific,” said Dominick Franzini, Inde’s manager of information technology operations. “We also benefit from the population of PensionPro customers that affirms some of the things we’re doing and also causes us to think about certain data and processes that we maybe hadn’t considered as strongly or thoroughly.”
Firms like Inde have embraced new technology for both efficiency and digital security. The firm migrated all of its systems and data storage to the cloud in 2016, and placed special emphasis on its business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Security is requisite part of the conversation. PensionPro’s System and Organization Controls (SOC) II audit contributes to Inde’s confidence in its systems and storage.
“We expect nothing less than top security,” Franzini said. “The audit shows a level of diligence and seriousness about data security for us and our clients and everyone downstream. It shows PensionPro is subjecting its operation to scrutiny – we’re grateful for that.”
