Education becomes even more important as firms seek to create holistic financial pictures
As we start a new year, CI is looking back on the firms that set themselves apart with our 2022 Monitor Awards for investing and retirement firms. Now in its 24th year, CI’s Monitor Awards program highlights the best tools and features offered by firms across a variety of areas critical to customer experience. This year’s awards in investing and retirement recognize best practices in UX features across the industry, including those that help clients become financial students. We distribute awards in gold, silver and bronze based on the quality of exceptional features and tools. These awards are solely about these features; we do not attempt to rank investing or retirement firms overall.
In this blog post, we spotlight two winners: Principal, in Retirement Plan Monitor, for its educational resources, and Calvert, in Asset Management Monitor – Investor, for its ESG resources.
Educational Resources in Retirement Plan Monitor – Principal shines
Principal earns the gold medal in Educational Resources category based on the strength of its suite of educational content, particularly financial wellness-related materials. The vast majority of Principal’s educational resources, housed on the Enrich platform, feature interactive courses and a highly personalized learning experience; while the platform lacks retirement-focused content, Principal fills this gap with its own proprietary resources which covers articles, webinars and seminars.
The Enrich platform covers a comprehensive range of nonretirement topics, including banking, family matters, healthcare, behavioral finance, budgeting, emergency funds, insurance and saving for goals. The platform provides an intuitive navigational experience and a search function, allowing users to find topics of interest to them. The Enrich platform also keeps its resources up-to-date, frequently updating its existing articles to reflect current economic trends or regulatory changes, adding new articles, and consistently using relatable, easy-to-understand language. The platform also offers an impressive collection of short, engaging videos with helpful usability features such as optional closed captions, transcripts—which include descriptions of key visuals—and a 10-second rewind function.
Key attributes considered in this category include:
- Depth and breadth of retirement-focused and general finance content
- Quality of resources
- Variety of content formats
- Findability and organization of resources
ESG Resources in Asset Management Monitor Investor – Calvert
Calvert earns the gold medal in this category as it highlights its focus on ESG on nearly every public site page. The firm discusses an incredible breadth of ESG topics across the site, often getting into detailed minutiae far beyond other firms we cover. Calvert provides a staggering 28 ESG funds—significantly more than any other coverage set firm—that comprise its full proprietary offerings. Even with this array of information, the firm is careful not to overwhelm users with dense text. The firm also provides ESG information in several resource types across the site, including commentaries, videos, reports, graphs, statistics, case studies, pull quotes, regulatory documents, press releases and a tool.
The What’s Your Impact? page—which houses an excellent ESG-specific tool—represents a great example of Calvert’s strengths. Investors can select any firm fund from a dropdown menu and immediately view its environmental impact in a dynamically updating infographic. Each infographic communicates statistics in terms easily understandable even by less financially literate investors. Investors can view multiple statistics for each of the sustainability categories Calvert offers and notably switch to a Shareholder Community Impact view, which demonstrates the full impact of all shareholders invested in the fund. The infographic links to the Engagement and Impact Metrics page, which provides a deep dive into the firm’s methodology for these statistics. Below the infographic, tables list out the statistics, punctuated with icons and graphs further illustrating the data.
Key attributes considered in this category include:
- Content themes
- Hub page design
- Resource formats
- Site positioning
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