RFI for Pension Administration System Replacement - Readiness Assessment

The New York State Teachers' Retirement System (NYSTRS) has issued an RFI for market research on a Pension Administration System Replacement (PASR) Readiness Assessment, with responses due August 21, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. ET. This is not a solicitation; no contract will be awarded based on the RFI. Responses will inform the structure and scope of a future Readiness Assessment RFP.

NYSTRS seeks vendor guidance on defining readiness criteria, recommended scope and deliverables, organizational and technology readiness assessment components, risks and lessons learned from comparable modernization efforts, team structure and engagement expectations, pricing drivers, and whether the readiness assessor should be independent of the future implementation vendor. The RFI response template classifies recommendations across nine areas: Readiness Assessment Scope, Recommended Activities, Deliverables, Organizational Readiness, Technology Readiness, Risks and Lessons Learned, Future RFP Recommendations, Estimated Effort and Pricing, and Team Structure.

NYSTRS operates a twenty-year-old legacy Pension Administration System built on PeopleSoft HCM with significant technical debt. The system carries more than 200 open initiatives in ServiceNow related to defects, enhancements, and new features. The current environment includes thirty-five to forty integrations with internal and external systems, heavy reliance on overnight batch processing, significant manual intervention requirements, decades of historical data with varying quality, and core architecture that does not natively support modern API frameworks, mobile experiences, real-time event processing, or cloud elasticity. The anticipated sunsetting of PeopleSoft in 2037, combined with lengthy modernization timelines observed at peer organizations, has prompted this effort.

NYSTRS manages benefits for a membership base of 459,974 individuals across 828 participating employers, processing substantial transaction volumes including 6,227 retirements, 17,681 retirement estimates, 10,945 loan issuances, and monthly COLA payments to 148,952 retirees in 2024. Responses must be submitted via the Bonfire Portal and may not exceed $1.3 million without prior written approval from NYSTRS. A virtual Q&A session is scheduled for September 15, 2026, with final submission of additional information due September 25, 2026. Vendors must disclose any use of artificial intelligence tools in preparing responses.