Account Access and EZLink
The ICMA Retirement Corporation was founded in 1972 to manage and administer plans exclusively for the benefit of public sector employers and employees. Today it manages assets for over 920,000 local and state government participants in more than 9,000 plans, providing retirement programs, administrative services and retirement tools.
Lattice Group has been an integral part of ICMA-RC's growth and information systems team since 1996, serving throughout its software development cycle, providing planning, design, development, testing and support functions as well as systems engineering, analysis, integration and implementation of their online web services and applications.
Tools launched by ICMA-RC, such as Account Access (for account management by plan participants) and EZLink (for plan administration by sponsors), were among the first of their kind for financial organizations and stood unmatched for years. When managing the transition of these systems to a new platform, Lattice Group addressed and solved challenges in scalability and resource consumption, resulting for example, in the dropping of the original Java application server in favor of BEA WebLogic, and the subsequent migration.
To provide seamless transition, Lattice Group provided a development and project management team who fully integrated with ICMA-RC’s internal staff. We then worked side-by-side to address development and production support issues as they arose. This commitment and close understanding of our client’s requirements and resources were vital underpinnings to our success. Lattice Group was tasked with modernizing these systems in 2001, and we recommended and implemented a pioneering platform of J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and XSLT, which allowed for rapid deployment of front-end changes while retaining robust performance and security. Consolidating on this platform vastly simplified the forest of languages, technologies, and versions in use across ICMA-RC, which in turn, enabled better allocation of resources. Lattice Group was also instrumental in creating systems for the display of investment information, such as the performance and characteristics of various securities. We demonstrated the power and flexibility of XML for information exchange by the “fund profile” display system which combines data from disparate sources such as internal performance feeds, spreadsheets from mutual fund vendors, data files from Morningstar, and hand-edited text files into standardized web-based output.
Among the first of their kind, Account Access and EZLink systems provide secure access for plan participants and plan sponsors to view their accounts, manage their investments, and oversee their retirement plans over the web. Account Access (for account management by retirement plan participants) and EZLink (for retirement plan administration by plan sponsors) were among the first of their kind available for any kind of account from any financial organization. Their capabilities were not matched by competitors in the deferred compensation plan field for years after their launch in 1996.
