Products September 15, 2022

Investment Product and Service Launches

Vontobel continues multi-boutique expansion in North America; AllianceBernstein launches active ETFs; and more.

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MSCI Insights Aims to Streamline Investors’ Risk Management Processes

MSCI Inc., a provider of decision-support tools and services for the global investment community, has announced the launch of Risk Insights, the first module of a new analytics platform, MSCI Insights, that calculates, stores and delivers a range of risk measures to help investors identify trends and respond to rapid changes in markets.

Institutional investors will be able to access a range of MSCI data and analytics through MSCI Insights, which will feature performance attribution, index data and ESG/climate data modules. Additional MSCI Insights modules are slated for release in the fourth quarter of this year and in 2023. 

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MSCI Risk Insights automates many analysis and reporting tasks otherwise performed manually by risk analysts. Automation allows investors to efficiently understand the overall level of risk in their portfolios, the changes in the risk, the causes of the changes and the actions that can be taken to achieve their investment goals. 

MSCI Risk Insights provides investors with historical risk data and the ability to customize a set of dashboards containing a broad set of metrics, including time-series risk, factor risk and stress tests.

BrightPlan Launches Equity Compensation Planner

BrightPlan, a financial wellness firm, has announced its new Equity Compensation Planner, available as part of the company’s total financial wellness solution.

According to BrightPlan, the new solution gives employees the digital tools and professional financial guidance they need to view and manage their employer-provided equity compensation. This enables employers to better retain and engage top talent by demonstrating the value of equity compensation—a key component of an employee’s total rewards package.

Through its self-serve capabilities, BrightPlan’s Equity Compensation Planner seeks to enable employees to track estimated equity value in near real-time for public company stock, as well as view potential value over time and trading windows, so they know when they can trade their equity.

Employees also have access to tailored educational content to learn about how equity compensation works. The solution includes unlimited access to BrightPlan financial planners. Employees can link other investment accounts to BrightPlan and have the ability to see all their investments in a single place.

AllianceBernstein Launches Active ETFs

AllianceBernstein Holding L.P. and AllianceBernstein L.P. have announced the launch of a new set of active exchange-traded funds on the New York Stock Exchange. The new funds are the AB Ultra Short Income ETF and the AB Tax-Aware Short Duration Municipal ETF. 

Global trading firm Jane Street will be the lead market maker on both products. The AB Ultra Short Income ETF, an actively managed ETF, aims to deliver higher levels of yield relative to cash or cash-like investments, while aiming for capital preservation in all market cycles.

The AB Tax-Aware Short Duration Municipal ETF, an actively managed municipal bond strategy, seeks to provide relative stability of principal and a moderate rate of after-tax return and income. The ETF offers municipal bond investors a distinct complement to their core allocations, providing the opportunity to help maximize after-tax income and returns using shorter-maturity bonds and opportunistic exposure to treasuries and taxable bonds.

Vontobel Continues Multi-Boutique Expansion in North America

The active investment management firm Vontobel has launched a number of new strategies. The press release announcing the new strategies describes them as follows:

  • The Vescore Active Beta Strategy invests in global equities and government bonds with a focus on tactical risk premia management through quantitative model-based allocation and risk management to help provide allocation attuned to the prevailing market environment;
  • The Vescore Active Beta Opportunities Strategy employs allocation of five risk premia—equities, fixed income, commodities, volatility and currencies—to create robust portfolios that seek long-term, positive absolute returns, as well as diversification potential and liquidity;
  • The Global Environmental Change Strategy provides access to clean technology pioneers by seeking to invest in stocks of companies with long-term growth potential that provide solutions for clean water, clean energy, future mobility, smart building, resource efficiency or recycling;
  • The mtx Sustainable Emerging Markets Leaders Strategy invests across global emerging market equities, seeking companies with above-average quality in terms of return on invested capital and strong industry positions that are able to invest in future growth; and
  • The mtx China A-Shares Leaders Strategy seeks to invest in stocks of companies characterized by high return on invested capital and strong market positions. Stocks in the portfolio qualify as either China A-Shares or are linked to China A-Shares.

 

Data & Research September 15, 2022

Unmarried and Married Women Have Different Levels of Retirement Confidence

EBRI research demonstrates that unmarried women are significantly less confident in their ability to live securely in retirement than their married counterparts.

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New research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute suggests that women would benefit from retirement advice that considers their marital status.

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The study from EBRI shows that unmarried women are less confident in their ability to retire securely than their married counterparts.

EBRI separated 758 female workers and 545 female retirees from a larger online sample of 2,677 Americans age 25 and up. The study weighted the sample by age, sex, household income and race using census data to make it more representative of the national population.

Among never-married women workers, 51% said they were not confident in their ability to live comfortably through retirement, versus 22% of married women and 55% of divorced women.

This insecurity comes from a variety of sources. For one, 27% of married women reported having $25,000 or less in total assets, whereas 56% of never-married and 58% of divorced women did.

Accordingly, unmarried women were more likely to say they were prioritizing shorter-term expenses over their retirement: 41% of never-married and divorced women said that saving for retirement is not a priority relative to current needs, compared with 27% of married women.

Unmarried women were also more likely to say they were prioritizing buying a home or starting a business over saving for retirement. This could suggest that unmarried women are looking for sources of independent income and wealth as a priority, or even as a substitute for retirement savings, though the study does not expand on this.

Another explanation for unmarried women’s relative retirement insecurity is that they are less likely to know who to go to for retirement advice, as 45% of never-married women said they do not know where to go for advice, versus 36% of divorced women and 27% of married women.

The study acknowledges that the responses of married women could reflect “collective knowledge,” meaning that though married respondents wouldn’t know where to go for advice themselves, they believe that their partner would.

Though the study weighted for a number of demographic factors, it did not include weighting for educational attainment. This is despite findings in the field of survey research that those without a high school degree are chronically undersampled, and those with a college degree are consistently oversampled. This is in part due to the fact that higher-educated people are more likely to have a cell phone, landline and access to the internet, and are therefore more likely to be sampled by survey researchers.

Research from Pew shows that better-educated adults are also more likely to be married, and as such the gap in retirement confidence between unmarried and married women may be due in part to married women tending to be more educated. In other words, the gap may be overstated since it does not weight for education, but it cannot be said for sure without further research.

The EBRI study also notes that unmarried women were more likely to say that debt was an obstacle to saving for retirement than married women, though it does not specify the sources of the debt. Among never-married women, 40% disagreed that debt was negatively affecting their ability to save for retirement, compared with 56% of married women.

Past research from Prudential’s Financial Pulse Survey shows that women tend to have less confidence in their retirement than men, and are less likely to have employer-sponsored retirement accounts. EBRI’s research shows that this insight can be further refined based on marital status, and can further inform the retirement investment advice provided to women workers and retirees.

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