The Corporate Insight Blog provides our clients with current and upcoming digital trends, news, and insights across financial services industries on variety of digital topics including mobile finance, social media, online financial platforms, user experience best practices and other hot-button tech issues.
Financial wellness has emerged as perhaps the most important trend impacting the retirement plan industry today. There is a growing consensus that employees’ personal finances not only impact individual workers and their families but also their employers and the nation as a whole. In this climate, employers and benefits providers are increasingly expected to help […]
Last month, private equity firm Warburg Pincus infused virtual RIA Facet Wealth with $33 million in Series A funding. The Baltimore-based startup, founded in 2016, differentiates itself in a commoditized digital advice marketplace with an unconventional client acquisition strategy, fee-for-service pricing structure and call-center-based advice delivery model. None of these strategies are unique in a […]
Since Corporate Insight last reviewed retirement income projection tools in November 2016, firms consistently introduced new, high-quality planners and enhanced existing ones. AXA introduced its first income projection tool in February of this year. Another four firms—Charles Schwab, Empower Retirement, MassMutual and Vanguard—completely overhauled their retirement income projection tools. Each of the five firms’ new […]
In reviewing online documentation capabilities for Corporate Insight’s latest Retirement Plan Monitor Report, a selection of best practices stands out in three areas: findability, document suites and delivery preference management. Findability Best Practices Centralize documents in a findable location: Integrate delivery preference management within document suite – Firms should let users modify their delivery preferences […]
VALIC’s new plan sponsor site represents a significant step forward and it is now among the more modern sites within the Retirement Plan Monitor – Institutional coverage group.The new site, called SponsorFIT and part of VALIC.com, is designed for plan sponsors and closely resembles its participant site counterpart. “FIT” stands for “Futures. Individually Tailored.” and […]
Retirement readiness serves as a strong indicator of retirement plan health. As discussed in Corporate Insight’s recent plan-level data report, readiness is a highly variable metric though is generally defined numerically through projected income replacement ratio and other related markers. What constitutes a healthy minimum income replacement ratio, however, is less than agreed upon as […]
In our research at Corporate Insight, we often refer to the proliferation of mobile platforms within the retirement industry as a sign of modernization and innovation. For the past two years, our Monitor Awards have discussed a burgeoning, industry-wide investment in native apps. Earlier this year, we published a blog post that considered the influx […]
The emergence of plan health data and tools that intuitively communicate critical plan and aggregated participant metrics continues to be the most prominent trend within the digital plan sponsor arena. At the start of 2017, 40% of firms within the Retirement Plan Monitor – Institutional coverage set offered some sort of plan health tool. Since […]
It’s official: Acorns entered the $28.21 trillion retirement market with Acorns Later, which offers Roth, traditional and SEP IRA accounts under the Acorns investing model. The much-anticipated launch, which came at the end of April, follows Acorn’s acquisition of Portland-based retirement fintech firm Vault in November 2017. Acorns Later follows the formula of a standard […]
This year the standard retiring couple will require an extraordinary $280,000 after taxes for medical expenses alone. Women will require $147,000 in retirement, while men will need $133,000, according to a new Fidelity study. These estimates represent a nearly 2% increase—the smallest increase since 2014—from last year’s average cost of $275,000 and do not account […]