Corporate Insight Releases Annual 
User Experience Awards in Investing and Retirement, Highlighting Rise of Account Customization
Now in its 22nd year, the Monitor Awards program recognizes digital innovation and best practices, awarding gold, silver and bronze medals in recognition of significant advances in web and mobile user experience over the past year.
“In 2020, the investment and retirement industries adapted to unprecedented user needs to digitally assess their financial health and retirement readiness,” said Michael Ellison, president of Corporate Insight. “With the pandemic pushing users to handle all finances online, we expect to see continuing, accelerated investment in personalized web and mobile functionality as well as comprehensive retirement plan and investment account data visualizations.”
___________________________________________________________________
Below, we proudly present the 2020 Monitor Award gold medal winners, determined by our Online Brokerage, Investment Experience, Investment Advisor Experience, Retirement Plans – Sponsor Platforms and Retirement Plans – Participant Platforms research services:
Online Brokerage
Core Product Offerings
- Fidelity earns the gold medal in the Core Product Offerings category by excelling over most other coverage set firms in four of the five product offerings we judge them on: bond trading, options trading, stock/ETF trading and managed accounts.
Account Information
- Fidelity wins for its consistently robust and user-friendly presentation of account details with a best-in-class account aggregation platform, an in-depth history archive and robust data views across internal accounts.
Equity Research, Alerts, Quotes, Watch Lists
- TD Ameritrade earns a gold medal for its consistently strong product screening tools, research content, investment alerts, watch lists and quote features.
Planning Tools
- Fidelity earns a gold medal for its robust portfolio analysis tools, wide range of goal planning capabilities and array of financial calculators. Clients can create and track simultaneous goals across several areas of their financial lives and include external account assets in their goal progress.
Online Help, Education and Self-Servicing
- TD Ameritrade moves up to the gold medal this year, as it offers a comprehensive range of accessible educational resources, online help features and site customization capabilities. The firm offers excellent prospect and client experiences via well organized, informative and helpful public and secure sites.
Mobile Experience
- Merrill Edge and Merrill Lynch earn a gold medal this year, with both firms providing mobile experiences with standout account information views and robust quote, research and trading functionality.
___________________________________________________________________
Investment Experience
Public Homepage
- Columbia Threadneedle’s public site homepage earns a gold medal for its commendable number of tools and resources presented in a clean and modern design. It offers an impressive embedded Find a Mutual Fund feature and a customizable fund watchlist that investors can access without being logged in, commendably expanding the tool’s utility to include prospective clients.
Secure Site Homepage
- T. Rowe Price earns a gold medal for its clear, detailed and feature-rich secure site homepage. An extensive intrapage tab menu gives investors the power to buy, sell and exchange assets as well as view important account details such as transaction history, performance, tax information and statements.
Fund Profile Pages
- Columbia Threadneedle retains its gold medal for its comprehensive and engaging fund profile pages. The firm stands out by offering multiple interactive visuals and a notably extensive overview.
Mailed Statements
- Janus Henderson boasts a colorful, comprehensive statement that stands out for its marketing efforts and supplementary resource promotion, winning the firm the gold medal this year. The statement shows primarily year-to-date portfolio information accompanied by sparse quarterly data but includes highly detailed account information and supplemental pages for mail-in forms.
Form Centers
- Fidelity takes the gold medal in this category for its well-organized, comprehensive and searchable form center featuring] some of the best filters in the coverage set, allowing users to search by both task and topic. These extensive filters— totaling 60 distinct, nonexclusive options—help investors locate forms even when they do not know the exact document name.
___________________________________________________________________
Investment Advisor Experience
Homepages
- Columbia Threadneedle earns a gold medal for its colorful, compelling and informative homepage. A helpful sidebar informs users of the latest firm updates and website changes, including a New and Noteworthy section that links to a collection of click-worthy resources and announcements.
Commentary and Thought Leadership
- Janus Henderson earns the gold medal this year for its impressive collection of timely commentaries, findable from a well- designed hub page. The firm advanced this year in part for its recent addition of webinars to its thought leadership, largely covering topics related to COVID-19.
Fund Profile Pages
- Columbia Threadneedle earns a gold medal for its comprehensive and engaging fund profile pages. The firm stands out by offering multiple interactive visuals and a notably extensive overview, and a high degree of information in an attractive presentation.
Fund List Pages
- PIMCO’s impressive fund list page earns the gold medal this year for its robust filter function and varied data points, which it presents across multiple useful views. The firm provides a single centralized list page for all funds and effectively organizes them using tabs and well-placed sorting elements.
Login & Registration
- American Century handily takes the gold medal for its intuitively designed and informative login and registration processes. Users can log in from any location on the site using a main navigation flyout menu in addition to the login capabilities available directly on the homepage. Similarly, registration is findable from all login locations as well as a universal header link.
___________________________________________________________________
Retirement Plans – Sponsor Platform
Homepages & Dashboards
- TIAA wins the gold medal for its best-in-class homepage with comprehensive selections of data, visualizations, resources and links. By default, the homepage overviews all sponsors’ plans, but a static header option lets them select any combination of plans to include in the display.
Plan Information
- TIAA wins a gold medal for its unique approach to presenting plan information, integrating most of the plan data pages—including plan health data and analytics—into its dynamic reporting tool.The firm provides a detailed Plan Rules page and a robust investment screener and comparison tool.
Plan Administration
- Fidelity’s Plan Sponsor WebStation (PSW) site earns a gold medal for its plan administration, with recent enhancements to its service request feature that makes the submission process more intuitive and user-friendly, alongside an automated contribution management processes.
Participant Data & Management
- Voya Financial earns the top spot for the most comprehensive suite of data and capabilities in this category. Voya provides a top-tier participant search tool coupled with a complete selection of personal, employment and plan-related participant information.
Reporting
- TIAA earns a gold medal for a best-in-class reporting tool that strikes a balance between efficiency and granularity, offering complete selections of customizable prebuilt reports and processes for creating new reports from scratch. The reporting tool is user-friendly despite its robustness, with features and help options that make it learnable for sponsors of all experience levels.
___________________________________________________________________
Retirement Plans – Participant Platforms
Participant Homepages & Dashboards
- Merrill earns a gold for its recently redesigned participant site homepage and revamped account dashboard. The updated homepage and dashboard are easy to navigate and feature a clean, modern design; previously, the dashboard data appeared cramped and was difficult to read. The homepage provides a helpful overview of all participants’ accounts and offers personalized elements, such as To Do list items, along with quick links to key site areas, like statements and transactions.
Participant Account Data
- T. Rowe Price earns the gold medal for its impressive suites of balance, contribution, allocation and retirement readiness data. The firm also provides detailed account histories and customizable quarterly statements.
Transaction Capabilities
- TIAA earns a gold medal for transactional interfaces that display all essential account information, and most include dynamically updating components like pie charts, graphs and contribution calculators to preview the impact of making the inputted change—a clear best practice.
Educational Resources
- Principal earns the top spot on the podium for its high-quality and comprehensive materials in a variety of formats including multi-step courses, articles, videos, infographics and webinars.
Tools & Calculators
- Principal earns a gold medal for its impressive range of engaging and intuitive calculators, especially within the Enrich platform. The platform offers a financial wellness assessment, which informs participants’ Financial Literacy Health ratings and content recommendations.
Mobile App Experience
- Empower Retirement earns the top spot in part for the significant enhancements it made this year to its already impressive mobile app. The app now features additional balance and historical balance details; online advice; and search options for transaction histories, statements and rates of return. Participants can also now request loans, and view or add bank accounts.