Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS)

The business case

Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) is the largest pension system in Ohio and ranks in the top 15 in the United States. With assets over USD 120 billion, OPERS has been providing services and benefits to its members for over 80 years.

The investment portfolio supporting these benefits is diverse across many asset classes, markets, and instruments. OPERS has been live on SimCorp since October 2020. Using a best-of-breed approach to manage these assets, the SimCorp platform plays a central role in accounting and fulfilling several business critical functions like Compliance, Collateral Management, Reconciliation, and Settlement.

The solution

In 2023, OPERS transitioned to SimCorp’s Continuous Testing Service. The solution means that SimCorp assumes responsibility for testing, ensuring a seamless upgrade experience, and minimizing risk for the client. By outsourcing testing, the pension fund could save time and resources, eliminating the need for internal testing staff and infrastructure.

Corby Kissler, Manager of Investment Application at OPERS, explained, “The decision to outsource testing was made to take further advantage of the SaaS capabilities of the product and free up internal staff to maintain their daily job duties while adding functionality to the accounting system.”

OPERS sought to leverage SimCorp’s extensive system knowledge and experience. By transitioning to Continuous Testing Service, the ability to predict upgrade timelines, and costs, and effectively manage the upgrade budget was markedly improved.

“As a new client, it was important to shorten the learning curve as much as possible for the upgrades, and this included using knowledgeable resources for testing,” Kissler added.

In his role, Corby Kissler has provided strategic and operational support for front, middle, and back office enterprise investment systems such as SimCorp Dimension, BlackRock Aladdin, Bloomberg AIM, Bloomberg Data, Charles River IMS, and MSCI, among others.

SimCorp’s Continuous Testing Service significantly alters both the timeline and the workload from a client’s perspective. That means an easier upgrading process, faster access to the newest capabilities on the platform, and a transfer of risk from clients to SimCorp.

“The main difference we saw going to Continuous Testing Service was the speed with which the testing occurred after the main set of test scripts and conditions were provided.

This allowed a very fast turnaround for the upgrade cycle measured in weeks instead of months as on our previous system. Because of these fast turnaround cycles and test runs, we were able to more quickly focus on functional testing in areas that could be pain points for our business,” said Corby Kissler.

Continuous Testing Service is based on a “shift left” approach. That means the testing runs earlier in the software development cycle. Moving the regression testing from post-release to pre-release means the client’s data, workflows and configurations are tested pre-release, and potential issues are corrected.

For OPERS, the solution allows the pension system to continue business as usual while keeping its tech debt in check and delivering new functionality to its business customers.

The results

The onboarding to Continuous Testing Service took 12 weeks to complete.

“When we saw the first timeline, we were somewhat apprehensive about the time between planning, the start date for activity, and the end date for delivery. The timeline was much shorter than our previous test cycle and definitely more compressed than our experience with our previous accounting platform,” said Corby Kissler.

Regular meetings and timely updates facilitated a seamless transition. Existing test scripts from the previous service were rapidly converted over to the new service.

“The scheduling and implementation of the upgrade using this service went without a hitch. Everyone in the business and IT areas was impressed with how seamless the transition was and appreciative of the light lift required,” Kissler added.

“What we appreciated most was a “template” roadmap that was based on past client experiences and expectations. Experiences with other vendors make it clear that most similar engagements are bespoke and cover new territory. With our SimCorp Continuous Testing team, it was clear we were dealing with resources that had a lot of experience with the process,” said Corby Kissler.

For OPERS, Continuous Testing Service proved to be a force multiplier, offering significant time and resource savings, increased agility and less of a big bang approach, and seamless transition and integration processes.

"This is one of those services I think is truly value add. It does free up your internal resources."