If you ask someone in the reconciliation department for TIAA-CREF about the good old days they may snap back at you, You mean when we reconciled thousands of accounts manually and never had the time to get around to the ones where we had discrepancies? Those good old days? You may get the idea TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund) employees dont wish for a return to those good old days. John Dominguez, director of treasury operations for the financial services company, gives the weather report, Our users were initially chilly towards the product, but theyve warmed up after using the system for a while.

With thousands of monthly transactions, Dominguez said TIAA-CREF set a goal of automating the reconciliation process. One of the first steps they took was to examine the possibility of building a system internally. It was rejected. It would have taken a lot of resources and a year to build, Dominguez said. Instead, the decision was made to find a software solution on the market.

Dominguez said the first step was to form a team made up of a half-dozen members of the reconciliation department to examine the options. This was eventually expanded to between 15 and 20 TIAA-CREF employees, including representatives from systems, auditing, and senior management. An initial group of three vendors was cut to two for the final presentation before CheckFree and its RECON-Plus product was selected. Their solution satisfied our needs for improved timeliness, automation, security, reasonable hardware and software requirements, and was reasonably priced, Dominguez said. Their reputation as a leader in electronic solutions also aided our decision-making process.