Products January 25, 2018

Empower Retirement Reveals PlanVisualizer System

The interactive technology enables retirement advisers to demonstrate to plan sponsors how modifications in plan design can impact their employees’ retirement readiness, and the shifting cost of providing the plan for the employer. 

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Empower Retirement announced that it will launch PlanVisualizer, a new adviser-support solution billed as “a powerful interactive technology that enables retirement advisers and consultants to demonstrate to plan sponsors how some modifications in plan design can impact their employees’ retirement readiness, pinpoint progress, and forecast plan contribution expenses.”

According to the firm, the new offering will be made available available through Empower’s adviser website. In a phrase, the tool is aimed at helping plan sponsors consider how possible changes to their plan—such as employer match, automatic enrollment and rate of auto-escalation—can impact their employees’ retirement prospects.

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“The ultimate goal of every retirement plan is to replace income in retirement,” explains Empower President Edmund Murphy III. “PlanVisualizer is designed to help employers better see and understand how the design of their plan can help employees achieve that goal.”

PlanVisualizer aims to create a holistic view of a client’s retirement plan in its current state, along with the ability to model how changes to key design elements can potentially affect participant preparedness. Importantly, the tool also helps analyze how changes to the plan might impact matching costs for the employer.

As seen in a demonstration supplied by Empower, the PlanVisualizer technology utilizes a core set of anonymous data points supplied by the adviser or consultant (including employees’ ages, salaries, retirement plan balances and contribution rates) to provide plan sponsors with customized insight across demographic segments, including a directional sense of participants’ current trajectory to replace income in retirement.  PlanVisualizer then “makes use of Empower proprietary data which utilizes multiple individual and actuarial data points to show individuals a score of how they are faring toward income replacement in retirement.”  

Advisers and consultants can employ this technology to communicate the effect of retirement plan design changes in real time, Murphy notes.

PlanVisualizer will also be offered by Putnam Investments to assist advisers and consultants in serving their clients. In recent years, Putnam has been working on maximizing its FundVisualizer tool, a free investment analysis tool that enables advisers, brokers and other intermediaries to evaluate and compare more than 30,000 mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and indexes using more than 80 performance and risk metrics.

For more information, visit www.Empower-Retirement.com.

Products January 24, 2018

Personalized Videos Adds to List of Targeted Features

Voya Financial says these new one-minute videos will combine an individual's "monthly income replacement goals, estimated monthly retirement income and possible shortfalls" to visualize their path towards retirement. 

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As the retirement industry sets out to increase participant-targeted communications, Voya Financial has added a new tool to their suite of retirement planning resources: personalized videos.

Available through their myOrangeMoney website, the videos will detail a participant’s own journey towards retirement and link the effects of positive actions towards future financial goals, according to Voya. The tool is relative to the myOrangeMoney experience, which allows individuals to understand personalized balances in the perspective of projected retirement income. Similar to the website, the videos combine monthly income replacement goals, estimated monthly retirement income and possible shortfalls, says Voya.

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“When it comes to retirement planning, our customers want information that is easy to digest and accessible when, where and how they want it,” says Christine Lange, senior vice president, Retirement Digital Solutions for Voya Financial. “We also recognize that individuals who are saving in a workplace plan benefit from a higher degree of personalization, and this can lead to better engagement and action. As we look to the future, we believe personalization is the most effective way to communicate with customers. Our videos place participants as the ‘main character’ of their own video-based journey, and this can help us nudge them toward better outcomes.”

Voya adds that according to industry research, “four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.”

Yet, when it comes to personalization, not as many consumers are on board. A 2017 Willis Towers Watson survey found that 57% of employees do not want an employer to send personalized messages to those facing imperative financial decisions, while 50% believe it is not the role of an employer to send personalized messages to those not participating in retirement savings.

“While employees are eager for their employers to provide support and technology that deliver valuable guidance and suggestions on retirement and financial decisions, employees are very wary of personalized outreach,” said Shane Bartling, senior consultant at Willis Towers Watson.

According to Voya, the added tools mirror continuous research with the Voya Behavioral Finance Institute for Innovation, such as studies of the gap time between information received to when it is applied by a consumer. Voya believes the tool exemplifies this research by reducing the time between education and action, all while helping the consumer select a viable choice.

More information on the resource, including an example of a personalized account video, can be found here.  

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