MetLife Inc., a provider of institutional income annuities, announced an expanded collaboration with Micruity, a retirement technology solutions firm, for MetLife’s Universal Digital Retirement Platform.

The new solution is an education, planning and annuity purchasing tool that integrates with current employment benefit, third party administrator and recordkeeping systems, the firms announced Thursday. Through the collaboration, plan sponsors will be able to increase access to immediate income annuities, provide educational materials on retirement income-related subjects and incorporate these options into their defined contribution plans.

“By augmenting the retirement planning tools available to plan participants through Micruity’s integrations, we are making it easier for participants to learn about and access retirement income solutions,” Roberta Rafaloff, vice president and head of institutional income annuities at MetLife, said in a statement.

The solution comes as plan sponsors, advisers and recordkeepers are considering how to address retirement income needs for participants. In a survey released Thursday by DCIIA’s Retirement Research Center, a survey of 18 recordkeepers found that 86% of them are looking for plan sponsor demand to prompt the addition of new retirement income solutions.

At the moment, 61% of recordkeepers are offering some kind of in-plan guaranteed income annuity option to plan sponsors, while the other 39% are not offering any annuity option. In comparison, 94% of recordkeepers are offering some kind of fixed dollar withdrawal option for participants.

Tech Implementation

Those recordkeepers are also heavily focused on the technological aspect of providing income solutions, with 53% of them working with external providers, and 47% partnering with providers.

MetLife and Micruity touted the flexibility of their expanded offering in the announcement. Trevor Gary, Micruity CEO, said in a statement, “Our flexible infrastructure means that we can efficiently build out new products and enhancements for our clients, iterating on components we previously configured for MetLife on Fidelity’s Guaranteed Income Direct and State Street Global Advisors IncomeWise platforms.”

IncomeWise blends traditional target-date funds with guaranteed lifetime income, according to MetLife; it is available for defined contribution plans and represents a multi-year, cross-industry development, which was launched in 2021.

Evaluating Options

In a separate announcement, T. Rowe Price launched a patent-pending solution, the five-dimensional framework, to assist plan sponsors in assessing retirement income options and deciding which options could best satisfy the demands of plan participants.

The global multi-asset research team and the global retirement strategy team at T. Rowe Price worked together to build the framework. The solution provides a common vocabulary for DC plan sponsors, advisers and consultants to understand the trade-offs that must be made between various retirement income products.

During the savings phase, investment solutions are often assessed  looking at a certain return for a given degree of risk. This framework for the decumulation phase finds a broader set of goals specific to the spending phase, such as:

• Longevity risk hedge: How many years will retirement savings last?
• Level of payments: What will the amount of annual income be?
• Volatility of payments: How much can “paychecks” change from year to year?
• Liquidity of balance: If a need arises, how much savings can be accessed?
• Unexpected balance depletion: How high is the risk of money running out earlier than planned?

“It is our hope that the 5-D framework and supporting research will become a standard for how in-plan retirement income solutions are evaluated,” Sebastien Page, head of global multi- asset and chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price, said in a statement.  “Our team has created an unbiased and uniform model that allows plan sponsors to visualize, compare, and contrast retirement income products.”