A better way to source income throughout retirement
The retirement industry will need to source retirement income from $15 trillion in savings and serve over 56 million retirees by the end of this decade1. This isn’t something that might happen. It is happening, right now. Retired households already hold nearly half of all investable assets in the United States2. These retirees certainly need retirement planning guidance, but they also need a way to optimally source their income throughout retirement. For many companies and advisors, sourcing these distributions is still a manual, ad-hoc, and lengthy process, driving down productivity and leading to lower client satisfaction. Providing the right solution to this problem will likely determine the winners and losers of this large segment of the market. The leading firms are already searching for the right products to leverage or working to develop their own solution. Whether firms want a fully customized integration, access to an API, or just want advisors to log on to a simple dashboard and click a button, Income Discovery’s Paycheck could be the answer they have been looking for.
Solutions that save time and money, and add value, are rare but it is easy to see how the right retirement withdrawal solution can deliver that. By automating key pieces of the distribution workflow, including documentation, reporting, and withdrawal instructions, firms can drastically decrease the time and effort spent on sourcing client withdrawals. Additionally, providing a detailed withdrawal strategy that is not only personalized, but also tax-optimized, is a clear way to demonstrate value and retain more clients. Holistic withdrawal strategies which span multiple years, or the entire retirement plan horizon, provide even more incentive for a client to keep coming back. Paycheck integrates with existing retirement planning software to do exactly that.
In today’s digital world, clients are more demanding than ever – and they should be. They expect a consistent experience, it must be quick, easy to understand, optimized, and personalized. “One size fits all” is no longer an acceptable solution. We need to consider every aspect of the client’s financial life: current investments, investment options, each different account type, lifetime income allocation, Social Security claim age, capital gains management options, pension payout options and more. To do less would mean providing a suboptimal plan. Regulators expect detailed reasoning for each recommendation made, so the solution also needs to track the recommendation and the rationale. On top of this, a growing population wants to have the option to manage everything themselves. Meeting all of these needs is certainly a difficult challenge, and one that cannot be solved at an individual advisor level.
With Paycheck, Income Discovery has delivered on every need mentioned above, putting all of these pieces together to craft a holistic and scalable paycheck solution. It empowers advisors to deliver a consistent client experience that is quick, easy to understand, optimized and personalized. Best of all, it is scalable and it is available as a self-serve solution. Going well beyond what an advisor can do on their own, Income Discovery’s analytics engine, AIDA, has been shown to increase a client’s safe income by as much as 30%3 throughout retirement. In other words, an extra vacation each year, a grandchild’s education fully funded, an emergency averted or family’s burden lifted. Paycheck may make this all possible.
Retirees and their assets have increased at high rates in the U.S., with nearly 80% of investable assets now held by retirees or near-retirees4. This powerful shift is in motion and the need is apparent. The industry will source $15 trillion in savings and serve over 56 million retirees by the end of this decade. Income Discovery’s Paycheck solution enables firms to fill this need, to deliver an optimized paycheck to their clients in order to scale their business and improve their clients’ financial lives.
1 This number excludes UHNW retirees and pre-retirees who hold an additional $16 trillion. LIMRA’s 2019 Fact Book on Retirement Income, https://www.limra.com/en/research/retirement/
2 LIMRA Secure Retirement Institute, https://www.limra.com/siteassets/newsroom/fact-tank/fact-sheets/10-facts-advisors-need-to-know-about-retirees
3 Safe retirement income is the amount of income that has a 90% opportunity of being available into a retiree’s mid-90s. Safe retirement income consists of all sources of income (not just guaranteed sources): Social Security benefits, pension payments, lifetime income payments, withdrawals from investments and any other incoming cash flows, such as part-time work and rental income. Safe retirement income is increased by Social Security retirement benefit claim deferral, purchase of annuities, changing investment portfolio asset allocation and other strategies. The amount of increase and the optimal strategy varies depending on the individual circumstances, annuity payout rates and capital market return expectations. Download the white paper for limitations of the analysis, details of a hypothetical client case and assumptions.
4 LIMRA Secure Retirement Institute and Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-population-in-the-total-us-population/