FIS supports about 600 recordkeepers and the millions of savers they serve. Brian Nicholson and Harshad Joshi of FIS explain how the FIS Retirement Platform (FRP) was rebuilt for the cloud, how it moved from COBOL to Java in phases, and how APIs and AI are making retirement technology faster and more personal.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Well, Brian Harshad, it’s so great to see you. Thanks for joining us on the program this morning.

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

Thank you. Thank you, glad to be here.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah, it’s great to talk to you guys. And look, I’m the type of person having been in the retirement industry for a long time. I love talking about the retirement ecosystem and especially technology providers like FRP because things are moving and they’re moving quick.

We’ll talk about that in a few minutes. Brian, I want to start with you because let’s, for the audience’s sake and mine, I want to, let’s talk about the types of clients that FRP serves because you serve a lot of different interests within the ecosystem.

Brian Nicholson, Head of IT Architecture for Retiremente, FIS Global

Yes, right. So we have, so we service retirement record keepers who are record keeping retirement plans. So our clients are the record keepers and their clients would be companies who are on a sponsor retirement plan for their employees.

So we have a number of clients, sorry, we have a number of clients who are using our legacy record keeping platforms. We have two of them, Relias and Omni. And we’ve developed FRP as a cloud-based platform, really a target for them to migrate their business off of the legacy systems into the cloud.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Well, thank you for that, Brian. Harshad, I want to come to you because I think Brian started to tease it out a little bit. Let’s talk about the difference.

And look, full disclosure, I grew up on the Omni platform. I was a mainframe guy, a COBOL guy. So I want to put that out there.

I worked with Omni Station and Omni Plus and Omni Manager. So with that being said, Harshad, what makes FRP fundamentally different from a technology perspective?

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

I’m glad you asked that because that understanding and differentiation is important, especially those who have been more acquainted with the traditional Omni platform, which has evolved into the modernized FRP platform. So I would say this, FRP is not just a modernized version of Omni to begin with. We have fundamentally tried to change the very foundations of the architecture of how the base record system was designed to begin with.

That included re-imagining the way the data layer would interact. That included how we hosted the system. That included how we provisioned the APIs through connectivity.

That included how we provided a whole new digital experience to our clients. So it is in a lot of ways, a complete foundational change that we have done in the core platform itself, yet preserving the core record-keeping principles and trust that is resilient within the ecosystem. So the knowledge and the core record-keeping principles have traveled, but the technology to enable that has been changed through FRP.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So Brian, it sounds like just based on what Harshad said, and also what you were talking about in terms of clients, record keepers today are no longer just data warehouses. They are asked by their clients, and therefore they’re asking you for a multitude of services, right? So they’re not just these typical old-school data warehouses that I grew up on many moons ago.

Brian Nicholson, Head of IT Architecture for Retiremente, FIS Global

No, definitely not. The retirement industry has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. Organizations have built capabilities and functionality that sit outside the record-keeping, and you call it data warehouse, but the record-keeping system of record to add value.

So when you think about a user experience, when they want guidance and advice, for instance, there’s organizations who’ve built capabilities in that space that do that expertly. And because we’re in this new paradigm in the cloud environment with API integrations, it’s much simpler to integrate to those services and offer those services to our record keepers who are using our platform. And I use guidance and advice as an example, but there’s a number of other features and functions that we as an organization are not intending to build directly.

Organizations build those, and we can plug into them with tremendous ease now compared to where it was more difficult in the past with the legacy technology.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

And to that point, Harshad, I mean, some of the things that have been coming up in the industry, and we’ll tease this out over the next couple of minutes, longevity is one, personalization. All these things are kind of really gone in, you know, as an individual participant, I want my own investment mix. I want all my own advice given to me individually.

How has that shaped or maybe reshaped FRP’s philosophy and design?

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

That’s a very good question because personalization and longevity have been two very key dimensions that actually help shape what the next generation FRP platform should look like. Think about it, what’s happening in the, with the longevity equation, right? As people live for longer years, retirement is no longer looked as a one-time, one-size-fits-all event.

Right? Everybody has different personal needs. Everybody has different personal goals that they want to achieve post-retirement.

Longevity has just made that personalization that much more important. So we had to incorporate, how do we re-imagine the platform that we help each of these personas, whether you’re a participant, whether you’re a record keeper, whether you’re an advisor or a sponsor, what would the journey look for you? If you’re a participant and if you have really large longevity and retirement events happening within your span of life, how do we capture those personalizations within the platform?

So we had to provision for how those experiences get designed in the ecosystem and made sure that we had the right technology provisioning for it so that we could provide those experiences, those uniqueness and those outcomes that each of these personas are looking at. So if you look at what we tried to do was we designed FRP not just to be a next transaction or how it processes the next transaction, but we looked at it from what would it need for the platform to serve an entire generation of retirement participants and their journeys as their longevity and personalization experiences enhance over a period of time.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So you earlier, Harshad, you mentioned the word cloud and I want to make sure, I think I have a conceptual idea of it, but what is the cloud and why the cloud? Why is that important in terms of infrastructure and technology development?

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

I’m glad you asked that because sometimes the value of what a cloud deployed platform can bring to the table is not well understood. So look at FRP as not just a platform that is hosted on cloud, but truly what cloud enables it to do. If you look at what cloud brings to the table is a huge amount of scalability, which can be very quickly achieved.

You can run up and run down on the capabilities of how much compute you want, how much amount of infrastructure provisioning you want, which traditionally took much longer time, right? You had to order the hardware, provision the hardware, deploy the software on it, and that could take months. With cloud, that becomes a very, very short journey.

So what does that enable you? That enables you to serve your clients faster, time to market gets accelerated and cloud truly becomes an enabler because it provides you the scalability, the security, the resiliency at speed and that drives the outcome for the clients. So look at cloud as a great enabler and not just a ecosystem where you host a platform.

That’s the power of cloud.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So let’s talk about managing a project where you’re swapping out the existing record-keeping platform. It’s proven technology, right? And you’re swapping it out for FRP.

How do you manage that? Because to Brian’s point, your point, there’s a lot of things that are interconnected here. It’s not as simple as just day one, you pull it out, put it in, day two, you’re ready to go, right?

I mean, you have to manage this. You have staffing, you have all the technology that you have to put in place.

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

Yeah, that’s a very good question. The first thing I would say is that we are not treating this like a big bang replacement. When you’re modernizing technology that has reliable processing power behind it, the goal is not simply to replace old code with new code.

The goal is to preserve the business rules, accuracy, and trust that have been built over many years while moving them to a foundation that can serve the next generation. And we did this deliberately as part of our design principles and went through a very phase-wise approach. With the first phase, we made sure that the core record-keeping system remains sacrosanct in the legacy environment as we went about changing all the peripheral around it.

So we put a new microservices layer, we designed a new global data store to consume data, we crafted out a whole new digital experience. But the core record-keeping, we still kept it in COBOL. That was the first part of the release and everything was backward compatible.

Once that was out as our first version of the release, we went to the next step to actually turn the core itself from COBOL to Java and get it cloud-enabled. So that was phase two. So even for the clients who are our existing customers who migrate, they have a phased approach to get to the final state.

It’s a journey, it’s an evolution. And with all of this, we had to also make sure that the core knowledge within the system, the deep record-keeping experiences and capabilities that our teams had, traveled through the entire modernization journey itself. So domain expertise had to travel with technology.

It wasn’t that you just modernized only the tech side of it and didn’t know how to address or the domain expertise was just left back. That wouldn’t work. So we had to get hand-in-hand to accomplish both this approach.

So when you modernize, you take the trusted environment platform over, you preserve the trust, prove the equivalency and make sure that the underneath technology moves in very controlled steps.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So just to follow up on that, so obviously it’s not swapping code in. I like that you bring up COBOL because that’s what I learned on many moons ago, as I said. How do APIs change the integration?

Because a lot of people may or may not be aware of what those calls mean.

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

Yes. And APIs form a very important part of the modern design because if you look at the traditional systems, one of the shortcomings from the traditional systems was how do we pull data in and out effectively out of the core record-keeping systems? What APIs enable you to do is very easily transact with the system.

Now, transaction could be in many forms. You might want to pull in data, you might want to push in data, you might want to consume data. A client may have their own digital experience and may want to consume FRP in a complete API only form.

So we went through a philosophy of API first design to enable that clients could consume us in whichever way they want. There was a hook that was available to get into FRP and meaningfully draw out the data that they wanted. Then that enabled us to hook partners, integrators, payroll providers very effectively into the platform.

And that exercise then doesn’t remain like a bespoke customization project where the client is stuck on hardwiring those integrations into the base platform. API completely changes that ecosystem and enables very quick, easy accessibility and modularity with the way the platform enables itself.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

And it’s part of the evolution which you talked about earlier. I promise I’ll come back to you in a second, Brian. I just want to ask one more question, Harshad.

How important are people? Because you can’t do this. Look, the world has evolved.

We’re going to talk about AI in a few minutes. But how important are people, resources, human resources to effectuating change and implementing and transitioning from one record-keeping platform to another? I have to think that they still remain an important part of that.

Harshad.

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

I’m so glad you asked that question because talent, people, and human capital is very central to such a massive initiative. And we couldn’t have ignored it at all. In fact, that was the very epicenter of when we embarked upon this journey.

So we looked at talent in various dimensions because we had to cater to very different set of roles we had to bring to the table. We had to have people who came with the UX experience. We had to have people who came in from a consulting experience, who could design the personas, the journeys that were needed.

We needed people who understood the legacy side of the ecosystem, with COBOL, like you said. But we also needed people who understood the new modern technology, which was Java, microservices, API, cloud enablement. We also needed people who understood the CI, CDA, and DevOps release cycle, because how would you deploy software as FRP?

With FRP, the whole deployment process is very different than you traditionally deployed the Omni platform. So we had to get almost 10 to 12 different skill sets to the table to work very collaboratively with each other, and then take the platform forward. So the intent was always to make sure that we carry the legacy domain knowledge and deep expertise that the existing team had with the modern technology and capabilities it brought together.

At one time, I remember we had more than 200 plus people working on this with all mixed set of skills, very tightly collaborating with each other. And that’s what really helped us move to the target state that we were imagining it to be. So yes, talent was absolutely the foundation, and it wasn’t easy, I have to admit, to bring all of these skills together.

But it was also very interesting to see how people stepped up, did a lot of transition of their own knowledge, took up new skills, and collaborated on the platform.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah, and to that point, Brian, I promised I would ring in, and I apologize for focusing on Harsha. But let me ask you about AI, because that is something that is talked about in every industry, including our industry and the financial services and retirement industries. How do you see that artificial intelligence kind of fitting in?

To Harsha’s point, it doesn’t sound like it replaces the humans, it sounds like it’s complementary. Brian, I want to hear it in your words.

Brian Nicholson, Head of IT Architecture for Retiremente, FIS Global

No, definitely it’s complementary. I kind of look at it in three pillars. FIS is leveraging AI in the SDLC process, so for development and testing, to bring in speed to development and certainly speed to testing and validation.

Certainly that is Harsha’s domain, so I’ll let him expand on that. But also we’re looking at it for where we can bring automation to back-end processes, complicated tasks that are, oftentimes it takes a human to go in and stream different steps together, where we can get that to be more of a streamlined process, we’re looking at it in that capacity. We’re also looking at it to improve the customer experience, where can we make the journey more simple and get them to their outcomes in a simpler way.

So those are kind of the areas of focus right now that we’re targeting, but as everyone knows, this is evolving technology, and so there’s a multitude of different areas where this can be leveraged. We’re looking at it very carefully and very cautiously to make sure that we’re looking to use it where we best can in this domain. But FIS in general, it’s a big focus for the organization, and I’ll let Harsha expand upon that and to where we’re looking at leveraging it.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah, Harsha, go ahead. And I think to your earlier point and to Brian’s point, it’s complementary technology, and I guess it’s an evolution in terms of how it’s going to continue to be deployed because it learns exponentially.

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

Yes, I would look at AI in two, three different dimensions. First, we can use operational intelligence with a lot of AI around FRP as such. Retirement has very highly structured rules-driven processes, reconciliation, compliance, document processing, everything that happens within the platform.

Where AI can help is identify these anomalies, route work intelligently, and automate every activity that can be pretty straightforward, allowing humans to focus on more critical work, more complex work, right? That is a big power AI can bring to the table. The other is around personalization.

The way we have designed FRP is it lends data to be personalized and gives a lot of self-serve capabilities to the end clients. We have tried to make sure that you can have some level of conversational capabilities with the platform through AI. And the third is, like Brian said, build, operate, and use AI to build the intelligence around how we actually do development.

And that’s a big focus within FIS where we are trying to adopt AI-first engineering principles. We have used a lot of AI capabilities to do performance testing on the FRP platform where performance was a bottleneck. We tried to use AI to exactly define where the bottlenecks were coming.

We used a lot of automation testing using AI. So I would look at AI as a big enabler in the ecosystem. It doesn’t replace human per se.

It really accentuates the entire experience and expedites what you can bring to the table in terms of differentiated outcomes through the power it brings to the table.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Well, these are certainly exciting times, gentlemen. New products, new services, new technology, more to come. Brian, Harshad, it’s so great to see you.

Thanks for joining us. And guess what? We look forward to having you back on the program again very soon.

Harshad Joshi , VP, IT Group Executive, FIS Global

Thanks for having us here. Thank you, Jeff.