Beyond Technology: What NYC BERS Teaches Us About Retirement Administration Transformation
For public retirement systems, modernization is often discussed in terms of technology: replacing legacy platforms, moving to the cloud, automating processes, or introducing new digital capabilities.
But the experience of the New York City Board of Education Retirement System (NYC BERS) demonstrates that true transformation goes much further.
In a recent conversation hosted by Majesco, Sanford Rich, Executive Director of NYC BERS, joined Dan Doonan, Executive Director of the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS), to discuss how retirement administration is evolving and what that evolution means for organizations, employees, members, and the technology supporting them.
Their perspectives point to an important conclusion: modernization is becoming less about a single technology project and more about building an organization that can continuously adapt to change.
A Retirement System with a Complex Mission
NYC BERS has been serving New York City employees for more than a century and today protects the retirement security of approximately 55,000 non-pedagogical employees of the New York City Department of Education.
BERS is one of five New York City retirement systems and is distinctive in part because many of its members are part-time employees, including school kitchen staff, advisors, and crossing guards. The organization manages approximately $12 billion in assets and administers both defined benefit and defined contribution programs.
That combination of scale, longevity, diverse benefits, changing legislation, and member expectations creates exactly the type of administrative complexity confronting retirement organizations across the country.
For BERS, transformation began with the need to move beyond a decades-old legacy environment. But that initial technology challenge ultimately became something much broader.
Modernization Changes the Organization, Not Just the System
When BERS transitioned from its previous mainframe environment, the organization quickly discovered that implementing modern technology also required new internal capabilities.
Processes that had previously been handled externally needed to be brought inside the organization. BERS built new data-processing capabilities, retrained employees, increased staffing, and developed greater internal technology and project-management expertise.
That experience highlights a reality familiar to many retirement organizations: replacing a legacy platform can expose operational processes that have developed over decades but have never been fully documented, standardized, or translated into system requirements.
Technology alone cannot resolve those issues.
Successful modernization requires organizations to understand how work gets done, develop internal subject-matter expertise, create governance around change, and establish teams capable of continuously improving the environment after implementation.
BERS did exactly that.
Over time, its internal team worked closely with Majesco to continue evolving its administration environment, including moving to V3locity. Rich described the subsequent transition as dramatically different from the original implementation experience, reaching expected functionality while coming in under budget.
The distinction is important. Transformation capability itself had matured.
Building Agility into Retirement Administration
Once the underlying foundation was in place, BERS was able to expand what the organization could accomplish.
The retirement system added Roth capabilities, integrated a call center, introduced campaign functionality for member outreach, and continued extending its processing capabilities across both its defined benefit and defined contribution programs.
Perhaps the most significant example came through enrollment.
Historically, BERS was not an automatic-enrollment system. Once the organization gained greater visibility into its payroll information, it identified more than 20,000 Department of Education employees who were eligible but not enrolled.
Technology gave BERS greater visibility into the issue, but solving it required more than technology.
BERS used targeted outreach while also working with its union partners and lawmakers to change the underlying legislation. When automatic enrollment ultimately took effect in November 2025, BERS moved from roughly 35,000 members to approximately 55,000 members.
Future eligible employees will now be automatically enrolled.
It is a powerful illustration of what modernization can enable.
The value was not simply that BERS implemented another system capability. Better data, technology, organizational processes, outreach, and policy change worked together to advance the organization’s core mission of providing retirement security.
Complexity Is Becoming the Norm
The BERS experience also reflects a broader industry trend.
Doonan noted that retirement plans have become substantially more complicated over time. Plans now operate across multiple benefit tiers, contribution structures, cost-sharing arrangements, legislative requirements, and increasingly nuanced benefit formulas.
Technology therefore must do more than process transactions. It must provide an adaptable administrative foundation capable of supporting continued change.
That need for agility is especially significant in the public sector, where implementing a new requirement may involve not only technology changes but legislative authority, governance processes, policy decisions, testing, and operational readiness.
As Doonan observed, retirement organizations cannot always respond to new requirements instantly. There often needs to be an appropriate operational and legislative “on-ramp” for change.
Modern platforms can help make that environment more manageable by allowing organizations to respond to change without repeatedly rebuilding their administrative infrastructure.
Data Becomes the Foundation for Success
Another lesson from the BERS journey is the importance of trusted data.
When BERS assumed responsibility for historical payroll information, the organization discovered extensive inconsistencies accumulated across decades of records.
Its response was structural.
BERS established a quality-assurance function to review and clean incoming payroll information so that new data entering the administration environment would be reliable. It also created a separate effort focused on cleaning historical records for members approaching retirement.
Rich expects that historical remediation process to continue for years because of the depth and age of the underlying information.
The lesson extends well beyond BERS.
Data quality increasingly determines what retirement organizations can accomplish.
Accurate data supports benefit administration. It enables member self-service. It improves operational reporting. It strengthens automation. And as artificial intelligence becomes part of the retirement administration landscape, trusted data becomes even more critical.
Doonan summarized the challenge simply: correcting bad information becomes substantially harder after it has entered a system and become mixed with accurate information. Strong controls at the point of entry can prevent years of remediation later.
AI: Govern First, Then Explore
Artificial intelligence naturally emerged as another important part of the discussion.
BERS is already approaching AI deliberately. The organization has established internal governance and is evaluating controlled use cases that keep personally identifiable member information outside the experimentation environment.
Rich sees opportunities in areas such as fiscal operations, analytics, data processing, and eventually retirement administration itself.
That interest is increasingly tied to an operational need.
Following automatic enrollment, BERS increased staffing, but Rich expects transaction volumes to grow significantly faster than headcount over the next several years. Greater efficiency will therefore be necessary to absorb that growth while continuing to deliver strong service.
For retirement organizations, that may ultimately prove to be one of AI’s most important roles.
The objective is not simply to deploy artificial intelligence because the technology exists. It is to identify governed, practical applications that allow employees to handle increasing complexity and transaction volumes while improving accuracy and focusing human expertise where it delivers the greatest value.
From Transformation to Continuous Evolution
Asked to describe the future of retirement administration in a word, Rich chose security.
Doonan chose evolution.
Together, the two words capture where the industry is heading.
Retirement organizations exist to provide financial security, but delivering on that mission increasingly requires an administrative environment capable of continual evolution.
Systems will change. Legislation will change. Member expectations will change. Data requirements will change. AI will introduce capabilities that are still difficult to fully envision today.
The objective therefore should not be modernization for its own sake.
It should be creating an organization that can adapt.
The NYC BERS journey demonstrates what that can look like: modern technology supported by trusted data, stronger internal capabilities, flexible operations, effective governance, and a partnership model that allows the organization to keep moving forward as requirements evolve.
That is the larger opportunity facing retirement and pension organizations today.
Modernization is no longer simply about replacing what came before.
It is about creating the capacity for what comes next.
Co-Authors
Denise Garth, Chief Strategy Officer, Majesco and Jessica Hurley, Senior Specialist in Strategic Marketing at Majesco
The post Beyond Technology: What NYC BERS Teaches Us About Retirement Administration Transformation appeared first on Majesco.
