The biggest technology project CalSTRS has ever undertaken is coming to fruition.

The Teachers' Retirement Board received news at the September meeting that the new pension administration system, which includes an updated myCalSTRS for members, will go live September 23.

The new system will track members’ service credit, compensation and payments throughout their careers. It also provides enhanced self-service tools and security features on the online member portal, myCalSTRS.

To support increasingly complex business and customer needs for CalSTRS’ growing membership of more than 1 million members and their beneficiaries, it’s crucial that CalSTRS has a pension administration system able to manage large quantities of data as well as enhance the customer experience.

These improvements will give members an efficient way to quickly calculate retirement estimates, check their retirement balances, update their profiles and preferences, easily access CalSTRS documents, expand use of secure messages, manage their direct deposits and more.

In preparing for this upgrade, current self-service features of myCalSTRS, secure messaging and other online requests will be offline until September 23 to migrate to the new system.

The pension administration system plays a key role in CalSTRS’ ability to fulfill its mission of securing the financial future and sustaining the trust of California’s public-school educators. The technology helps CalSTRS pay more than $19.2 billion per year to approximately 333,410 benefit recipients each month.