Investment Product and Service Launches

Hartford Funds Announces 1st Private-Equity-Focused Fund

Hartford Funds announced the public launch of the Hartford Schroders Private Opportunities Fund, an actively managed closed-end tender offer fund for accredited investors that primarily invests in private equity strategies.

The fund is designed to provide broad exposure to a wide range of primarily small and midsize buyout and growth companies with enterprise values that range from $50 million to $1 billion, which are typically not accessible to investors through public equity markets.

The Fund seeks opportunities within high-quality direct and co-investments, as well as primary and secondary private equity funds located in the U.S., Europe and Asia. It will generally focus on the following five sectors: health care, technology, consumers, services and industrials.

“We believe that, by offering the Hartford Schroders Private Opportunities Fund in a tender offer fund structure, we are helping expand investor access to private equity investments through lower investment minimums, periodic opportunities for liquidity, and familiar 1099 tax reporting, as compared to traditional private equity funds,” Vernon Meyer, Hartford Funds’ CIO, said in a statement.

Intention.ly Launches Advisor Brand Builder

Intention.ly, the growth engine design consultancy firm, announced the launch of the Advisor Brand Builder, a brand asset generation engine. The solution will be co-engineered by Intention.ly’s CEO, Kelly Waltrich, and Melissa Thomas, who will serve as the president of ABB.

“ABB combines the expertise and oversight of the agency option with an AI-optimized workflow to deliver a revolutionary brand development experience,” Waltrich said in a statement.

The brand generation engine serves up three custom brand style boards, including logo, color palette, brand imagery and more, as well as a complete firm message framework. The ABB team then jumps in to give each brand a thorough review, licensing images and refining the board for professional use. According to the firm, the whole process from start to applied brand assets takes less than 48 hours.

“The real magic of ABB is that it enables firms to build a unique, high-impact message platform and a suite of custom assets with a push of a button,” said Thomas in a statement. “The output is fully vetted by the experts of our agency team, delivering an end-to-end experience that simply doesn’t exist for advisory firms today.”

Lincoln Financial Introduces LincSmart

Lincoln Financial Group announced its new insurance technology experience, LincSmart, a simplified benefits administration experience. LincSmart will offer a host of InsurTech solutions for employers:

• Absence status: real-time delivery of claim and leave status updates;
• Evidence of Insurability decisions: instantaneous updates from Lincoln to an employers’ enrollment system, saving valuable time on EOI decisions;
• Enrollment and member maintenance: real-time updates made to member eligibility data that help make the claims process more efficient; and
• Plan design: automated transfer of plan design information from the Lincoln system into an employers’ enrollment system, reducing manual input and errors.

“The LincSmart solution makes it easier to understand which benefits management options are available, how they can improve processes and how to engage us for consultation,” Patrick Sullivan, Lincoln Financial’s vice president of InsurTech Partnerships, said in a statement. “Our goal is to help our employer partners stay efficient and competitive with automated InsurTech solutions that maximize their valuable time.”