Client Service March 21, 2024

Empower Announces Suite of Guaranteed Income Solutions For Retirement Plans

Empower plans to distribute the four new offerings through advisers and consultants.

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Empower today announced plans for a suite of new partnerships to offer in-plan and out-of-plan guaranteed retirement income solutions for investors saving through workplace plans available through advisers and consultants.  

Empower announced multiple options to convert participant retirement savings into an income stream, which can be customized to individual needs for guaranteed retirement income.

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Empower’s retirement business serves “smaller plans up to the some of the largest plans in the U.S., [where] the demographics [of each] are different, the needs of those plans are different, certainly preferences are different and so having a one-size-fits-all doesn’t make a lot of sense for us,” explains Tina Wilson, chief product officer at Empower.

Each of the Empower guaranteed options will be debuted on its own timeline, with all being in the market by October, Wilson adds.

“Some will [launch] within the next 90 days, but everything that [is launching] will be released by the [beginning of the] fourth quarter,” Wilson says.

A Suite of Offerings

Empower’s four new offerings include:

  • managed accounts with a guaranteed lifetime income withdrawal benefit, featuring Income America by American Century Investments;
  • a target-date fund series featuring American Funds and TIAA’s secure income account with flexPath Strategies managing the glide path allocations and the collective investment fund provided by Great Gray Trust Company, LLC;
  • Empower managed spend-down strategy and proprietary variable annuity;
  • and access to an annuity marketplace that offers a out-of-plan annuity offerings through Blueprint Income.

“They’re all insurance contracts,” Wilson says.

More than three-quarters (76%) of plan sponsors prefer to retain in their plans the assets of both retired and terminated participants, compared to 44% in 2015, according to a March 2023 Empower white paper with data from the Callan LLC 2022 DC trends survey.

“We want to make sure that we do have a range of options to help those plans and their fiduciaries make the best decisions based on their needs, their demographics, and, frankly, what’s going to drive the right outcome for their participants who we’re all here to serve,” WIlson says. “If we’re going to serve the needs of those plans and those participants, a big part of that need is to have retirement income capabilities.”

For Empower, the increased plan sponsor interest in retaining assets means greater demand for guaranteed income products, “the time is right now” to launch because participants can invest to create a stream of income, Wilson adds.  

Engineering Retirement Income in the Managed Account

Empower’s managed account, typically under the new offering, will begin to invest in the guaranteed retirement income sleeve about 15 years before retirement.

“It’s highly personalized, meaning that the individual may or may not get a recommendation around income depending on whether they need it,” adds Wilson. “A lot of people do [but also] there’s a cohort of people where guaranteed income doesn’t make sense for them.”

For participants, Empower’s “advice engine” delivers personalized guidance about how much guaranteed retirement income individuals should purchase, adds Wilson.

“We have a lot of information about [participants],” Wilson says. “Just by being a recordkeeping client, we know…your salary, we know your [retirement account] balance, we know how much you’re saving every period…we know your match, we know your plan design, so there’s a lot that we know about you without your ever giving us information. We call that passive personalization.”

Plan sponsors can also provide additional information, Wilson adds.  

Participants may choose to allocate between 0% and 30% of their assets to the retirement income sleeve for guaranteed income, according to Empower.

American Century will allocate participants’ assets to insurance products, within a collective investment trust that has investments as well as embedded insured components, Wilson says.

Empower plans to distribute the retirement income products through advisers and consultants, says Wilson.

“Income products have been around for a long time but they’ve been there as standalone products that frankly, participants couldn’t absorb on their own,“ she says. “They struggled with making the appropriate decisions, so what’s also changed is our ability to think about income in conjunction with advice.”

Empower is a retirement plan recordkeeper for $1.5 trillion in assets, for 18.5 million participants and 70,00 plans, says an Empower spokesperson.

Data from the PLANSPONSOR 2023 Recordkeeping Survey shows Empower ranked second overall among recordkeepers, serving as plans with $1.231 trillion in assets, for 16.83 million people and more than 80,000 plans on its proprietary recordkeeping platform.

Compliance March 20, 2024

GOP Proposes Bills to Require Longer SEC Comment Periods, Overturn Private Funds Adviser Rule

Introduced in the House of Representatives, a bill to invalidate the private funds adviser rule would be unlikely to pass the Senate.

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At a hearing Wednesday, “SEC Overreach: Examining the Need for Reform,” the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Capital Markets heard testimony on 13 bills it is considering to address what it terms the “frenetic, partisan rulemaking agenda” of the commission under Chairman Gary Gensler.

The bills reflect the concerns long expressed by committee Republicans and trade groups.

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Representative Anne Wagner, R-Missouri, who chairs the subcommittee, called the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approach to regulation “aggressive and burdensome,” and she expressed concern about an “alarming absence of stakeholder input and meaningful cost-benefit analysis during the rulemaking process.”

Wagner also criticized as too speedy the SEC’s rulemaking process, questioning why comment periods on proposed rules have been as short as 30 days. A discussion draft of one of the bills circulating in the subcommittee would require the SEC to have comment periods of at least 60 days, excluding federal holidays, for rule proposals. Under current law, comment periods must be open for at least 30 days, inclusive of holidays.

In remarks at the hearing, Wagner also criticized the SEC for issuing its recent climate disclosure rule earlier this month.

“As members of this committee have made clear: The SEC is not an environmental regulator, nor was it given clear authority to finalize climate-related regulations that will only burden American businesses with serious costs,” Wagner said, adding that the full financial services committee plans to review the new rule in detail on April 10.

A bill proposed by Wagner would require the SEC to explicitly identify a market failure and calculate its size before proposing a rule to address it, and the commission would also have to identify any market participants that would be subject to the rule. This bill reflects a common industry refrain that many SEC rule proposals under SEC Chairman Gensler are “a solution in search of a problem.”

William Birdthistle, the former director of the SEC’s Division of Investment Management who recently stepped down, answered this longstanding criticism at the Investment Adviser Association’s 2024 Compliance Conference on March 7 by saying that parents do not wait until their child is in an intersection before acting, therefore if the SEC anticipates an issue in the future, it does not have to wait for the problem to arrive.

Other proposals and drafts before the committee would require the SEC to review every rule every five years and conduct a new economic analysis for each; to issue a report to Congress twice per year on the SEC’s discussions with foreign securities regulators; and to report to Congress on the SEC’s data and cyber security measures.

Still other legislation targets specific SEC rules. One bill would invalidate the private funds advisers rule, currently being challenged in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That rule would require private fund advisers to provide more disclosures to clients on fees and performance and to provide valuation opinions to clients for adviser-led transactions. Oral arguments took place in February but the court has not yet ruled on the issue. The subcommittee has not announced a date for a markup or vote on the bills discussed during the hearing.

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