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Hybrid vigor: Many RIAs like support from broker-dealers
The hybrid registered investment advisor (RIA) channel is no longer just “a midway point to owning an operating an independent RIA autonomously” but a distinct business model, according to Cerulli Associates’ latest report, U.S. RIA Marketplace 2018: Designing a Framework for Independence.
“The hybrid model has staying power,” said Marina Shtyrkov, research analyst at Cerulli, in a release. “Among advisors who switched to the hybrid model in the past one to five years, only 23% would choose to drop their broker/dealer (B/D) affiliation and move fully to the independent RIA channel if they were to switch firms.”
That may be good news for life insurers who hope to market commission-paying annuities to RIAs. “The appeal of commissionable product access can’t be underestimated, even in a fee-based environment,” said Shtyrkov. “The difference between being a hybrid RIA—with the infrastructure and product support of a B/D affiliation—and an independent RIA is greater than it may initially seem.”
Over the past decade, the hybrid RIA channel more than doubled its share of advisor headcount, to 8.8% from 4.1%. “This migration is primarily from wirehouses and independent broker/dealers (IBDs). Almost one-quarter of advisors who switched to the hybrid RIA channel one to five years ago are either wirehouse or independent B/D advisors,” she said.
The hybrid RIA channel attracts advisors who want autonomy with partial infrastructure, product access (commissionable and fee-based products), and a platform that can support growth. It can also absorb advisors who can’t or don’t want to manage a business and also work with clients, according to Cerulli.
Hybrid RIAs have grown faster than their independent RIA peers, the Cerulli report shows. Across all assets-under-management (AUM) segments from 2012 to 2017, hybrid RIAs saw a higher five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) than independent RIAs, thanks in part to their B/D support.
The Cerulli report provides additional insight into the dynamics of the RIA channel, including a comparison of long-term hybrids with transitional hybrids, an analysis of market sizing, advisor attributes, custodian and asset manager relationships, investment decisions and product use, and practice operations and growth strategies.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
Britain’s DB plans roiled by gender equalization
UK corporate defined benefit (DB) pension plunged into deficit on aggregate in October following a High Court ruled that guaranteed minimum pension (GMP) payments could not be paid at different ages for men and women under EU equality laws.
The DB schemes of the UK’s 350 biggest listed companies showed a combined estimated deficit of £36bn (€41bn) on October 31, down from a £3bn aggregate surplus on September 30, according to Mercer Consulting.
“With the continuing backdrop of uncertainty likely to persist in the run up to the UK’s departure from the EU early next year, trustees should evaluate the potential impact on their sponsor’s financial security and put themselves in a position to capitalize on de-risking opportunities as they arise,” said LeRoy van Zyl, a DB strategist and partner at Mercer.
Pension funds were continuing to de-risk their portfolios and crystallize investment profits, Zyl said: “The need for taking selective action was demonstrated again during October as markets stepped back significantly from previous gains.”
Total liabilities rose by £21bn, Mercer said, attributing nearly three quarters of that to the UK High Court ruling. Combined assets fell by £8bn, due in part to falling equity markets. The FTSE All Share index fell 5.1% in October. The MSCI World index fell 5.6% in sterling terms.
While the High Court ruling related specifically to the Lloyds Banking Group pension plans, many other DB funds are expected to have to recalculate benefits and potentially make payments in arrears, according to a report in IPE.com.
Adrian Hartshorn, senior partner at Mercer, said, “Preliminary analysis… has suggested an increase to liabilities of between £15bn and £20bn, with the additional costs potentially flowing through the P&L account.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
SEC fines Citibank $38m for mishandling ADRs
Citibank N.A. has agreed to pay $38.7 million to settle charges of improper handling of “pre-released” American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a bulletin this week.
U.S. securities that represent foreign shares of a foreign company, known as ADRs, must be matched by an equal number of foreign shares in custody at a depositary bank. They are subject to a practice called “pre-release.”
Pre-release allows ADRs to be issued without the deposit of foreign shares if a broker or its customer owns the required number of foreign shares and if the brokers receiving them have an agreement with a depositary bank.
But Citibank improperly pre-released ADRs to brokers in thousands of transactions, the SEC found, when neither the broker nor its customers had enough foreign shares. This inflated the number of a foreign issuer’s tradable securities, which led to inappropriate short selling and dividend arbitrage.
The SEC action against Citibank was its second against a depositary bank and sixth against a bank or broker amid an ongoing investigation into abusive ADR pre-release practices.
“Banks and brokerage firms profited while ADR holders were unaware of how the market was being abused,” said Sanjay Wadhwa, senior associate director of the SEC New York regional office.
Without admitting or denying the charges, Citibank agreed to pay more than $38.7 million, including a return of more than $20.9 million in profits from the illegal practices, $4.2 million in interest, and a $13.5 million penalty, the SEC release said. The SEC order acknowledged Citibank’s remedial acts and cooperation.
Andrew Dean, Joseph P. Ceglio, William Martin, Elzbieta Wraga, Philip Fortino, Richard Hong, and Adam Grace of the SEC’s New York office conducted the investigation under Wadhwa’s supervision.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
‘The Advice Opportunity’
Honorable Mention
RetireOne platform to offer Great American Index Protector 7 FIA
RetireOne will offer the Great American Index Protector 7 fixed indexed annuity on its platform for RIAs and other fee-based advisors who are looking for no-commission annuities for their clients, the two companies announced this week.
Great American Life partnered with Wade Pfau, Ph.D., and InStream Solutions to create a tool that simulates the effects of allocating part of a retirement portfolio to the Index Protector 7.
In addition to its collaboration with InStream, Great American Life has forged technology integrations with Quovo, Tamarac, Orion and others. ARIA Solutions’ RetireOne platform has provided fee-based insurance products to over 900 RIAs and fee-based advisors since 2011.
OneAmerica crosses $2bn mark in retirement plan sales
OneAmerica expects $2.34 billion in retirement plan sales by the end of 2018, a nearly 20% increase from $1.93 billion at the end of 2017. It will be the first $2 billion-plus sales year for the Indianapolis-based financial services firm.
OneAmerica provides administrative and participant services for nearly 12,000 plans with over $63 billion in assets under administration. Its regional sales directors work with advisors and advisor firms representing plans with $3 million to $250 million in participant assets.
OneAmerica focuses on tax-exempt 403(b) plans, plans for professional services firms and plans for manufacturing firms.
“Our recent announcements of OnePension and Personal Retirement Accounts, through Russell Investments, are just two examples of how we are helping participants prepare for retirement through a next-gen default investment solution and guaranteed lifetime income option.”
OneAmerica is the marketing name for the companies of OneAmerica. Insurance products are issued and underwritten by American United Life Insurance Co. (AUL), a OneAmerica company. Administrative and recordkeeping services are provided by McCready and Keene, Inc. or OneAmerica Retirement Services LLC.
401(k) balances reach new high-water marks: Fidelity
Fidelity Investments today released its quarterly analysis of retirement savings trends, including account balances, contributions and savings behavior, across more than 30 million retirement accounts. Highlights from this quarter’s analysis include:
- The average 401(k) balance reached an all-time high of $106,500, surpassing the previous record of $104,300 from Q4 2017. The average balance is seven percent higher than a year ago and 87% above the average balance of $56,900 in Q3 2008. The average IRA balance increased to $111,000, almost a 4% increase from last quarter and more than twice the average of $52,000 in Q3 2008. The average 403(b) account balance reached a record high of $85,500, nearly double the average balance of $43,300 in Q3 2008.
- The number of people with $1 million or more in their 401(k) increased to 187,400 at the end of Q3, an increase of 41% from the 133,000 401(k) millionaires in Q3 2017 and nearly 10 times the 19,300 savers with a $1 million in their 401(k) in Q3 2008. The number of IRA millionaires increased to 170,400 in Q3 2018, up 25% from a year ago.
- The overall average employee 401(k) contribution rate reached 8.7%, the highest level since Q4 2006. Contribution rates for women investors reached a record high with an 8.5% average rate in Q3. In addition, 32% of 401(k) women investors increased their contribution rate over the last year, compared with just 14% of 401(k) women investors who increased their contribution rate in the 12-month period ending in Q3 2008. IRA contributions among female Millennials increased 19% in the past year.
- Half of all 401(k) accounts now hold 100% of savings in a target date fund. For the first time, more than half (50.4%) of 401(k) savers have all of their assets in a target date fund. Just over 30% of overall 401(k) assets are in target date funds, up from 9.8% of overall assets in Q3 2008. In addition, slightly more than half (51%) of all “new” 401(k) contributions go into a target date fund. For 403(b) savers, the percentage of individuals who have all their assets in a target date fund climbed to 62%, a record high.
An analysis of 401(k) savers who have been in their plan for either five, 10 or 15 years straight revealed the following:
- Among workers who have been in their company’s 401(k) plan for five consecutive years, which is 32.2% of Fidelity’s entire 401(k) platform, the average balance reached $221,200 at the end of Q3, up from an average of $103,700 five years earlier. Among Millennials within this category, the average balance reached $82,000, up from $20,600 five years ago.
- Among participants who have been in their 401(k) plan for 10 years straight, the average balance reached $305,400, nearly five times the average balance of $65,700 for this group 10 years ago.
- The average 401(k) balance for workers who have been in their 401(k) plan continuously since Q3 2003 increased to $400,300 in Q3 2018, more than eight times the average balance of $47,800 for this same group in Q2 2003.
Empower offers new platform for IRA clients
Empower Retirement said this week that it will launch a digital consumer-focused wealth management platform for new and existing owners of Empower Individual Retirement Accounts as well as for prospective clients.
The new platform will bring investment advice, financial planning and insurance to “underserved mass affluent investors who may not currently work with a professional advisor as they make crucial personal financial decisions,” an Empower release said.
Empower will develop the platform in collaboration with Toronto-based Wealthsimple US, Ltd., and Dallas-based Apex Clearing Corp. Wealthsimple will build the user experience of the new retail platform. Apex will create and manage back office functions.
Empower, with approximately $570 billion in assets under administration and 8.7 million participants in 38,000 employer-sponsored retirement plans, is the nation’s second largest retirement plan provider.
Affordable Care Act co-ops lead insurance impairments: A.M. Best
Three health insurance co-ops (Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans) that were formed through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became impaired in 2017, representing all U.S. life/health impairments in the last year and 18 of 20 impairments since 2015, according to a new A.M. Best special report.
The Best’s Special Report, titled, “2017 Life/Health Impairments Update,” states that from 2000 to 2017, 159 life/health insurers became impaired. The impairments consisted of 132 insolvent liquidations, 25 rehabilitations (of which 13 were closed during the period) and two conservation actions.
The significant challenge of operating as a qualified nonprofit health insurer under the ACA was the leading specific cause and was present in 19 of the impairments, A.M. Best said.
During the 2000-2017 period, 72% of the impairments concerned health (90) and accident and health (25) insurers, while 15% (24) related to small life insurers primarily focused on selling lower policy value industrial/burial or stipulated premium business in the South.
The remaining 13% of impairments involved five fraternal entities, eight annuity writers, and seven other life or combined life, annuity and health business. Six of the seven health insurer impairments in 2015 and nine of the 10 insurer impairments in 2016 related to the co-op plans.
Impairments are situations where companies are placed by court order into conservation, rehabilitation or insolvent liquidation. Supervisory actions undertaken by insurance department regulators without court order were not considered impairments for this study unless policyholder payments were delayed or limited.
Most impairments fell into the category of general business failure arising from a combination of poor strategic direction, weak operations, internal controls weaknesses or under-pricing and under-reserving the business.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
A Tax Break That Could Raise Retiree Income and Reduce the Deficit
Taxes raise money for government operations, but they also sometimes serve to change behavior in society. Taxes on cigarettes are a well-known example because they tend to cause smokers to quit, especially when the taxes approach the cost of a pack. Society further benefits from a reduction in health-related costs.
I propose a tax change that would provide retirees with more spendable (after-tax) income and change financial behavior.
The tax decrease also would reduce the federal deficit. But before we discuss the benefits to the Treasury, let’s describe how retirees get their boost in income.
Boost income for retirees
Many retirees are necessarily conservative in their investments in retirement, since they don’t have new savings dollars to make up for any losses when markets decline, nor time to wait for a recovery. Those conservative investments, like Treasury bonds and CDs, earn less than stocks over the long run, and generate less cash flow than riskier investments.
What people really need in retirement is more money, not less.
Here is what I would suggest to help retirees generate more income by changing their behavior.
This tax cut would increase revenue. Really.
An example:
A retiree who is 70 years old might decide to put most (70% is the recommended rule of thumb) of his or her rollover IRA money in conservative fixed investments earning an average of 3% today. In contrast, if the retiree annuitizes a portion of that IRA savings, he would receive about 8%. The tax collector would receive at least 2.5 times more tax revenue from that shift.
The IRS could simply keep 100% of that additional tax. But a decrease in the tax on that income would promote annuitization and give retirees more money to pay for late-in-life expenses like health care. It could also stimulate revenue growth and provide several other economic and societal benefits.
The concept works for retirees. The next step is convincing legislators that this would also be good for the overall economy.
Four benefits for the economy
Benefit 1: The government would generate as much or more revenue by encouraging annuitization.
Benefit 2: Retirees would have more money to spend, stimulating the economy.
Benefit 3: Would-be retirees now with more income might leave their jobs earlier, creating openings for younger workers.
Benefit 4: Increasing spendable retirement income would reduce pressure on social programs—especially Medicaid, which supports long-term care, and Social Security.
Retirees with more income, for example, could afford in-home care and stay in their residences. They also might choose to put off Social Security payments until they are 70, which delays cash outflow from the system.
Tax cuts for good reasons
The tax authorities do this already in other areas. For example, by granting life insurance favorable treatment, death benefit proceeds are received income tax-free. The origin of this benefit, I believe, was to encourage individuals to buy life insurance as a way of protecting widows and orphans.
Long-term care benefits are also income tax-free, again to ensure against a critical risk. Longevity is another actuarial risk that society will pay for one way or another.
A simple way to provide a tax break for the purchase of longevity insurance is to exclude a percentage, perhaps one-third, of annuitized payments from tax. Studies we’ve done show that approach is relatively neutral in terms of the total tax bill for a retiree’s retirement income.
To make sure this tax break is not abused, the exclusion could be capped. And the tax break could apply to any form of annuitized income, including those offered through corporate or government pension plans, as well as income annuities offered by insurance companies.
This tax break and the higher spendable income, in turn, would encourage more workers to invest more of their retirement savings accounts.
What else does it take for win-win?
In addition to legislating this new approach for the IRS, investors and their advisors need to think differently.
Traditional advice to retirees focuses on asset allocation: divide savings into various buckets to balance risk and reward. I advocate that investors instead concentrate on income allocation.
First, decide how much spendable income your savings can produce. Then decide how to create that income. This approach is also safe, and at its core produces guaranteed income for life via the allocation to annuitized income.
Retirees often are reluctant to put part of their savings into annuitized income. They either imagine the stock market will produce more money, or they are afraid to bet on their own longevity.
A tax break on annuitized income might persuade more retirees to consider an alternative that would benefit them—and U.S. coffers.
© 2018 Golden Retirement. Used by permission.
‘I’m Not Retired. I’m Independent.’
We need to retire the term “retirement.” We use this word several times a day, but we sense its lifelessness. It was never more than a by-product of pensions, and pensions were just carrot-flavored sticks invented by scientific managers to “retire” 65-year-olds in a timely and efficient manner.
In the heyday of pensions, of course, retirement was huge. Wintering in Florida or Arizona became a pastime that millions of ordinary older Americans took for granted. So many retirees enjoyed union pensions that, for decades, it seemed like all of them did.
But, today, when only police, firefighters, schoolteachers and a few other public sector workers still earn defined benefit pensions, “retirement,” for most people, is losing meaning. Like “golden years” and “senior citizen,” it’s beginning to sound archaic.
But what should replace it, lexicographically?
I suggest “Independence.” Starting in the near future, I propose, you won’t ask people with white hair, “Are you retired yet?” You’ll ask, “Independent yet?” They will smile and say either “Not yet” or “You bet!”
People will stop working when they can afford not to. On that day, they will be independent, as in “independently wealthy.” They won’t necessarily be wealthy, but they’ll probably be debt-free. Independence will never sound as old as “retirement.” It will imply nothing about your age.
Everyone will follow a different path and a different timetable to independence. Social Security’s full retirement age will still represent a milestone for many people, but independence can start earlier or later than that. People who love their work will keep working; retirement never meant much to them anyway.
“Pre-independent” people will still buy mutual funds through payroll deferral (though the term, “retirement plan,” will likely fade away). The still-employed may even start saving earlier and harder than ever, in hopes of reaching independence sooner. The Millennials I know seem to want independence today.
Unlike retirement, “independence” has no demeaning or dismissive connotations. Every American yearns for independence. It’s the ideal on which our country was built. When’s your Independence Day?
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
New Bedfellows: Richard Neal and the 401(k) Industry
Sixteen-term Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts is now a key figure for those who follow retirement-related legislation. As of Tuesday’s election, he’s the next chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, through which all tax-related legislation passes.
“Richard Neal has said that retirement will be his number one focus,” said Chris Gaston, government policy director at Davis & Harman, speaking at the SPARK Forum in Palm Beach this week. The SPARK Institute represents 401(k) recordkeepers.
In recent years, Neal introduced H.R. 3499, H.R. 4523, H.R. 4524, and H.R. 4444, all retirement-related. A proponent of requiring employers to help workers save for retirement at work, he backed the auto-enrolled workplace IRA at the heart of the MyRA program, which the Trump administration cancelled in 2017.
In 2017, Neal and then-Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX), helped preserve the carried interest tax loophole lobbied for by Wall Street firms. In 2007, he helped lead an unsuccessful movement to reform the Alternative Minimum Tax.
Ex-representatives must vacate their offices by Thanksgiving. Then the holiday season arrives. Republicans may, however, may use their majority to pass another tax cut before the 115th Congress ends on January 3.
Given the broad appeal of retirement reform, some are optimistic of the passage of a bipartisan bill sooner or later. “There is the rare occurrence of bipartisan support for retirement improvement,” said Beth Glotzbach, head of DCIO (defined contribution-investment only), Franklin Templeton Investments, at the conference.
As Ways & Means chairman, Neal isn’t just the gatekeeper of retirement legislation. He’s also the only legislator who can ask for President Trump’s tax returns. Neal said Wednesday that he will do so. But the President threatened after the election to retaliate against Democrats if they try to force disclosure of those documents.
Open MEPs and PEPs
Shortly before the election, the Republican-led House passed the Family Savings Act (H.R. 6757), a response to the Retirement Enhancement and Savings Act or RESA (S. 2526) that came out of the Senate Finance Committee last spring. Both have bipartisan support, but there may not be time for them to be reconciled and passed before the 116th Congress begins on January 4.
“I wouldn’t put the chances of a Family Savings/RESA Act resolution during the lame duck session at 50/50. I’d put it at 33%,” Mike Hadley, an attorney at the Washington firm of Davis & Harman, said at the SPARK Forum. “But if it doesn’t happen this year, it’s likely that Neal will propose it in the next Congress.”
Both bills would change current pension law to allow the formation of open multiple employer plans (open MEPs) or pooled employer plans (PEPs). Plan providers, such as recordkeepers, advisory firms, independent fiduciaries and payroll firms could sponsor 401(k) plans and invite dozens or hundreds of small or mid-sized unrelated employers to join them.
MEPs and PEPs could revolutionize the 401(k) industry. A massive land rush could occur, as dozens of provider-firms stake claims by establish PEPs. Consolidation is anticipated, as PEP-sponsors try to aggregate existing small and mid-sized plans. Expansion of 401(k) coverage is also expected, as employers without plans decide to join PEPs.
There will be winners and losers. “Let’s say that everybody still gets a slice in the new MEP world,” said David Levine of Groom Law Group during a panel discussion at the SPARK Forum. “But do some people get a bigger slice than they have now, and others get a smaller slice? I would challenge any assumption that everyone will win with MEPs. It could dramatically consolidate the market. Or it might be no big deal.”
One view is that a large registered investment advisor (RIA) like CAPTRUST or SageView that specializes in selling and advising retirement plans will be best-positioned to dominate a MEPs/PEPs world. “An advisory firm or two will figure out how to sell multiple-employer plans and will monetize this space,” said Rob Barnett, an administrative vice president at Wilmington Trust in Boston, which advises plan sponsors and custodies plan assets. “At first, MEPs will have to be ‘sold.’ But eventually they will be bought because the process will become pretty easy.”
Another view is that firms will cooperate on and compete for PEP business at the same time. “One of my favorite words is ‘frenemy,’” said Levine. “There are so many different scenarios. Historically, everyone stayed in his or her own lane. But in the future there’s going to be increasing overlap,” he said.
Levine described a potential “competitive free-for-all” where various types of plan providers cooperate but also compete. A recordkeeper might create a MEP and market it with its own sales forces or through plan advisors. Advisors might help recordkeepers sell MEPs, but also start their own MEPs and try to take away small employers from recordkeepers.
“This will fundamentally change the TPA [third-party administrator] marketplace,” said Kelly Michel, chief marketing officer at Envestnet Retirement Solutions, which can support RIA firms that decide to sponsor MEPs. She participated on a panel at the conference with Fred Barstein, founder of TRAU, The Retirement Advisor University.
“The vanilla kinds of small plans will be delivered through MEPs, and they won’t need more than one TPA each,” Michel said. “As plan sponsors, the recordkeepers will be most at risk [for fiduciary liability] and they may decide not to outsource the role of 3(16) fiduciary to a TPA at all. So this might dis-intermediate a lot of TPAs.” [A 3(16) fiduciary can administer 401(k) plans and act as their “named fiduciary” under pension law, with responsibility for ensuring that plans act in the best interests of their participants.)
Barstein sees MEPs as a way to modernize small plans. “One reason that MEPs will be so disruptive,” he said, “is that the MEP sponsor, whether it’s an advisory firm, a broker-dealer, an independent fiduciary, or a recordkeeper, will have an incentive to be innovative. Small plan sponsors have no incentive to be innovative. They don’t want to be out in front of the herd. They want to be in the middle of the herd.”
Given the uncertainty of the future, observers at the conference could let their imaginations run fairly wild. They spoke of Amazon or Google buying a plan recordkeeper and using their immense platforms to get into the retirement business. They spoke of “fly-by-night” self-described fiduciaries who might tempt small employers into too-good-to-be-true MEPs.
What will Neal do?
No one claims to know exactly where Neal wants to take the retirement system, or whether he will have the power to do so, given that the Senate and the White House can block any Democratic initiative. There is also some question if he will have time and energy to devote to defined contribution system reform.
“Historically he favored the auto-enrolled workplace IRA, but for last two years he has been behind a mandate that all employers offer a retirement plan,” Gaston said. “This has gotten support from a number of financial services firms, who are more inclined to support a federal mandate to preempt state mandates. He wants to modernize the retirement system.”
This year, much of Neal’s time and attention has gone into trying to save “closed multiple employer plans,” which are distinct from open MEPs. Closed MEPs are defined benefit plans for companies in the same industry or that employ members of the same union.
“He’s on the joint committee on the future of closed MEPs,” Gaston said. “He’s trying to keep the PBGC [Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation)] from running out of money, and to make sure workers get the benefits they’ve been promised. This is really sucking away oxygen from him and his staff. He’s about to get the keys to the castle, but he has headwinds elsewhere.”
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
Stats from Bob Kerzner’s LIMRA Swan Song
SEC proposes the use of shorter prospectuses for variable annuities
In a move long-sought by life insurers, the Securities and Exchange Commission is proposing to allow issuers of variable annuities and variable life insurance contracts to use “summary prospectuses” in making their required disclosures to the investing public.
A traditional prospectus can run to hundreds of pages of small print—and even smaller footnotes.
“This document would be a concise, reader‑friendly summary of key facts about the contract. More‑detailed information about the contract would be available online, and an investor also could choose to have that information delivered in paper or electronic format at no charge,” the SEC said in a release this week.
The Commission has requested public comment until February 15, 2019, on the proposed rule changes, as well as on hypothetical summary prospectus samples that it has published. The Commission has also published a Feedback Flier that it will use “to seek investor input about what improvements would make the summary prospectus easier to read and understand, and what information investors would like to see included,” the release said.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
Income annuity tied to debit card with cash rewards is launched
Here’s a novel way to market single-premium immediate annuities.
Relay, an service that couples a Guggenheim Life and Annuity immediate period-certain annuity with a prepaid debit card offering cash back rewards, has been launched by
“insurtech” firm Group1001, according to a release this week.
Relay provides a monthly cash flow stream over a predefined term and cash-back rewards of 3% to 13% each year, depending on the length of the plan selected. It claims to “eliminate [purchase] restrictions typical in these categories.”
For instance, a person can go to the RelayRewards website and decide that they want to pre-pay $1,000 in monthly expenses for the next five years. The Relay calculator tells them that an annuity paying that amount will require a single premium of $59,677. Each month for the next five years, $1,000 will be added to the person’s RelayRewards debit card.
Purchases made with the card will earn an average reward of $840 per year ($70 per month) for the next five years, or a total of $4,200, according to the calculator. For the sake of comparison, the current quote for a five-year period certain annuity at immediateannuities.com is $1,048 per month.
“Relay delivers on that need with a completely fresh take on annuities,” said Andres Barragan, chief experience office of Group1001, in the release.
Relay is now available in Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, with service expanding to Florida and Texas on November 1st, 2018. Relay will also be available in California in the next few weeks, with additional state expansion planned for the coming months.
Group One Thousand One, LLC is a U.S. insurance holding company, with current combined assets under management of approximately $37 billion as of December 31, 2017. The Relay Visa Prepaid Card is provided by Sunrise Banks, N.A., St. Paul, MN.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
What’s Up, Doc Huffman?
Gary “Doc” Huffman, the chairman and CEO of Ohio National Life, was sitting in a vast ballroom in New York’s Marriott Marquis Hotel Tuesday, waiting with a thousand other life insurance executives to hear former FBI director James Comey deliver a keynote address at LIMRA’s annual conference.
I approached him and asked about his firm’s recent industry-rattling decision to discontinue certain compensation to distributors on its once-popular but closed ONCore Lite and other variable annuity (VA) contracts with guaranteed minimum income benefits.
I told him about the perception among advisors that Ohio National is taking fees from contract owners and not passing them through to the intermediaries. I also asked why Ohio National shut down its annuity business.
With respect to the last question, Huffman (who ceded the role of president to Chris Carlson earlier this year) told RIJ that Ohio National looked at rising stock market values, saw the growing risk to its book of VA business, and decided it was time to contain the risk. (Over the past six months, the company has made two offers, one still open, to buy certain contract owners out of certain contracts.) He said the company’s move out of annuities wasn’t sudden, but rather the culmination of a five-year plan.
That’s nothing Huffman hasn’t said before; the Cincinnati press reported it two months ago.
But let’s consider the compensation issue, and its linkage to the larger question of possibly exaggerated living benefit guarantees.
The issuer of a deferred annuity with an income benefit knows that producers will jump on a contract that promises a great payout rate (typically beginning several years after purchase). The issuer also knows that its actuaries can pump up those promises by tweaking age-related payout percentages, rider fees, deferral periods, deferral bonuses, and expected surrender or lapse rates. The income benefit is optional, after all, and it is assumed that not everyone who pays for the option will exercise it.
Though a notional number, the promised payout rate carries credibility. It’s a guarantee, after all, based on the superior strength rating of the carrier. Broker-dealer reps know an under-priced annuity contract when they see one. Premiums roll in. Contract owners pay an annual one percent fee for the guarantee.
A few years down the road, if premiums and equity prices combine to increase the carrier’s liability on the product, perhaps requiring more reserves, the carrier closes the contract to new sales. Later, if liabilities continue to climb, it may offer to buy back the riskiest contracts (i.e., the ones that are most valuable to the owners). It can even, apparently, find a reason to end deferred compensation.
If you’ve ever seen Mel Brooks’ 1967 movie, “The Producers,” starring the incomparable Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, you may notice a similar conflict. All goes well only if the audience walks out at intermission.
Huffman said Ohio National has relationships only with broker-dealers (B/Ds), not advisors, and that it is still paying “service fees” to B/Ds. The service fees are paid to the B/Ds to help market the contracts; they are not related to producer trail compensation. Huffman said B/Ds might use these fees to compensate advisors or producers so that they could continue to service these contracts.
A B/D executive told me that Huffman’s statement matches the executive’s understanding of the situation except for the “fact that they [Ohio National] are not paying the ‘service fee’ on about 70% of our assets [in Ohio National VA contracts].” An independent advisor with a large book of VA business with Ohio National, for whom losing a 1% annual trail is meaningful, said the service fees to B/Ds are a fraction of the producer trail fees, and that no one’s offering him either one.
Variable annuities with guaranteed lifetime income benefits are labor-intensive, the advisor told RIJ. Circumstances are constantly changing. Retired clients’ needs for income are subject to sudden changes (such as after the death of a spouse). The value of the living benefit guarantee can fluctuate with market performance. Excess withdrawals and forbidden asset allocation changes can jeopardize the guarantees.
Moreover, the income option can be exercised only on certain dates or during certain windows of time. Advisors look to trail commissions, as opposed to one-time upfront commissions, to compensate them for monitoring the situation over the life of the contract, which can last decades.
Disputes like this one can only worsen perceptions of the annuity industry. (See last Monday’s scathing critique in the Wall Street Journal). Several years ago, after the financial crisis, several life insurers offered to buy back rich VA contracts. It rattled producers’ faith in annuities. Such events certainly don’t encourage advisors who have never sold deferred variable annuities to start recommending them to clients.
Policyholders, meanwhile, are in danger of paying advisor-related fees without getting the advice that the fees are supposed to cover. And without timely attention from their advisors, they could inadvertently violate the terms of their contracts and lose benefits that they’ve paid thousands of dollars in rider fees to maintain. The possibility of lawsuits, not surprisingly, has been raised.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
Expect a Rocky Return to ‘Normal Valuations’
The Standard and Poor’s 500 index of share prices has fluctuated wildly during 2018 but has returned to nearly the same level that it was at the beginning of the year. The absence of a net fall for the year reflects the combination of a rise in corporate profits and a 12% decline in the price-earnings ratio. And the fall in the price-earnings ratio is an indication of the likely evolution of share prices in the next few years.
The price/earnings (P/E) ratio is now 40% higher than its historic average. Its rise reflects the very low interest rates that have prevailed since the US Federal Reserve cut the federal funds interest rate to near zero in 2008. As long-term interest rates rise, however, share prices will be less attractive to investors and will decline.
A key sign of this is that the yield on ten-year Treasury bonds has doubled in the past two years. But, at a little over 3%, it is still barely above the rate of inflation, which averaged 2.9% over the past 12 months. Three forces will cause the long-term interest rate to continue to rise.
First, the Fed is raising the short-term federal funds rate and projects that it will increase from a little over 2% to about 3.5% by the end of 2020.
Second, the very large projected budget deficits will cause long-term rates to rise in order to induce investors to absorb the increased volume of government debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the volume of publicly held debt will rise from about $15 trillion now to nearly $30 trillion by the end of the decade.
Third, the very low and falling rate of unemployment will cause inflation to accelerate. Investors will demand higher yields on bonds to compensate for the resulting loss of purchasing power.
It would not be surprising if the rate on ten-year Treasury bonds rises to 5% or more over the next few years. With an inflation rate of 3%, the real yield will be back to a normal historic level of over 2%.
This normalization of the ten-year interest rate could cause the P/E ratio to return to its historical benchmark. A decline of that magnitude, from its current level of 40% above the historic average, would cause household wealth to shrink by about $8 trillion.
The historic relationship between household wealth and consumer spending implies that the annual level of household consumption would decline by about 1.5% of GDP. That fall in household demand, and the induced decline in business investment, would push the US economy into recession.
Most recessions in the United States have been relatively short and shallow, with durations of less than a year between the beginning of the downturn and the date when the recovery begins. The recession that began in 2007 was much longer and deeper because of the collapse of financial institutions. The faster and more robust recoveries that characterized most previous recessions reflected aggressive countercyclical monetary policy by the Fed, which cut the short-term interest rate very sharply.
But if a recession begins as soon as 2020, the Fed will not be in a position to reduce the federal funds rate significantly. Indeed, the Fed now projects the federal funds rate at the end of 2020 to be less than 3.5%. In that case, monetary policy would be unable to combat an economic downturn.
The alternative is to rely on fiscal stimulus, achieved by cutting taxes or increasing spending. But with annual budget deficits of $1 trillion and government debt heading toward 100% of GDP, a stimulus package would be politically difficult to enact.
As a result, the next economic downturn is likely to be deeper and longer than would otherwise be the case. If the government at that time chooses to use fiscal policy, the future debt-to-GDP ratio will rise further above 100% of GDP, forcing long-term interest rates even higher. It is not an attractive outlook.
Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, chaired President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984.
© 2018 Project Syndicate.
‘Roll-in’ specialist exceeds $4 billion in account consolidations
Retirement Clearinghouse (RCH), which specializes in automating the movement of savings from one retirement account to another when plan participants change jobs, said that it has completed consolidations for more than 155,000 retirement accounts with over $4 billion in total assets as of October 26, 2018.
RCH works with plan sponsors, record-keepers, and participants to complete assisted rollovers, automatic rollovers, assisted roll-ins, and automatic “roll-ins,” which transfer and consolidate retirement savings into a participant’s existing 401(k) or IRA accounts.
In a release, Charlotte, NC-based RCH said it has assisted rollovers into existing IRAs, numbering 82,700 accounts with $2.9 billion in total saving into existing IRAs. It has also facilitated “roll-ins” of more than $980 million in assets from 46,700 accounts to participants’ current-employer 401(k) plan. The roll-ins included more than 1,000 automatic transfers completed by the year-old RCH Auto Portability service.
RCH Auto Portability consists of:
- An electronic-record “location” function to search and identify instances where an individual has multiple retirement accounts.
- A proprietary “match” algorithm confirming that the located accounts belong to the same participant.
- Receipt of the participant’s affirmative consent for the transfer of their assets in an automated roll-in transaction, either electronically or via a representative.
- The implementation and completion of the automated roll-in transaction.
Originally established as RolloverSystems in 2001, Charlotte, N.C.-based Retirement Clearinghouse works with more than 24,000 retirement plans and has helped guide over 1.3 million plan participants with more than $19 billion in retirement savings. Retirement Clearinghouse is a portfolio company of The RLJ Companies, founded by Robert L. Johnson.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
Managed wealth exceeds $46 trillion in US: Cerulli
The U.S. professionally managed wealth market surpassed $46 trillion in total assets during 2017, increasing 14.9% year over year. The split of assets between institutional and retail clients continues to shift toward retail, closing 2017 with 47.8% attributed to retail channels, according to a new report from Cerulli Associates.
Retail assets have largely outpaced institutional client assets in terms of growth over the last decade. This can be attributed to greater equity exposure in retail channels, and to increasing amounts of assets migrating from institutional channels to retail channels (e.g., individual retirement account rollovers).
In addition, institutional asset owners (corporate defined benefit and state and local defined benefit plans) hold a significant amount of fixed-income assets, which have not performed as well as equities due to extended periods of low interest rates. Opportunity continues to exist in the institutional channels, but asset managers cannot afford to ignore the development and distribution of retail products.
“As asset managers look to the future of product development and strategy, they should carefully evaluate several key factors,” said Brendan Powers, senior analyst at Cerulli Associates, in a press release. “These include increased demand for low-cost index options, fee pressure, and commoditization.”
The report cites expanded investment vehicle offerings, increased use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, and broadened deployment of multi-asset-class solutions as trends to watch for product innovation and distribution.
In terms of distribution, the institutional space is becoming increasingly consultant-intermediated, while the financial intermediary channels are increasingly influenced by broker/dealer home-office and registered investment advisor custodian professional buyers.
Cerulli’s latest report, “The State of U.S. Retail and Institutional Asset Management 2018: Evaluating Channel Opportunities to Increase Assets,” provides an overview of the aggregate U.S. asset management landscape, benefitting both U.S. asset managers and those seeking distribution opportunities in the U.S. It explores all distribution channels, client segments, and product vehicles, with a focus on the interaction between the retail and institutional marketplaces.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
An Industry Haunted by Its Own History
Bob Kerzner, in his final address to the LIMRA membership after 14 popular years as their CEO, posed a perennial question: why hasn’t the life insurance industry capitalized on the Boomer retirement opportunity to the degree that it hoped, expected and, in its mind, deserved to?
A complete answer to that question (which may stem in part from a post-demutualization misalignment of interests with the public) will fill a book someday (see note at end of story).
Kerzner spoke at the annual LIMRA conference, which was held this year at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York. As the polyglot mass of tourists posed for snaps with the “Naked Cowboy” et al in Times Square below, a thousand or so dark-suited executives gathered soberly in the hotel ballrooms above.
The conference was ornamented by the appearances of a celebrity guest speaker, former FBI director James Comey, and an inspirational TED talker, Simon Sinek (pronounced “cynic”). Both spoke of one’s duty to callings higher than achieving sales goals; both were also promoting new books.
The most productive breakout session at the conference, for annuity issuers at least, may have been a discussion about potential synergies between various annuity industry stakeholders. Robert DeChellis, CEO of Allianz Life Financial Services, moderated a panel consisting of Gumer Alvero of Ameriprise, Zach Bevevino of BlackRock and George Riedel of T. Rowe Price.
Their conversation shed as much light on the differences between the interests of assets managers, retail advisors, and institutional providers as it did on their similarities. The panelists explained, as panels of distributors have explained during nearly identical discussions at past conferences, that they face their own challenges, which are not necessarily related to annuities.
BlackRock’s income fund
Bevevino, product strategist for BlackRock’s Multi-Asset Group, explained that while BlackRock manages about $300 billion for variable annuity issuers, and while its CEO, Larry Fink, declared that retirement is the big asset manager’s top priority, the company is more focused on satisfying demand for safe income with a non-insurance product.
That product is the Multi-Asset Income Fund, and BlackRock is struggling with it. The fund is designed to yield a steady 5% a year, Bevevino said, but “hasn’t sold well in retail channels. Why do retirees not understand what they need? We have a whole working group with a research component looking at this.”
[But that product is expensive. It is actively managed and has lagged its benchmark after accounting for fee drag. The A-share assesses a 5.25% front-end load. The C-share charges 1% upfront and 1.59% per year. The institutional class charges a mere 0.57% per year but requires a $2 million investment.]
Regarding annuities, BlackRock has a web portal, iRetire, where advisors can access “retirement income planning technology… for use alongside clients.” It solves income plans using one of five BlackRock model portfolios: Tax Aware, Target Allocation, ESG (environmental, social and governance), Smart Beta, and Income.
“iRetire helps us sell annuities,” Bevevino said. “The interface lets advisors include essential spendings in their plans and choose the right model portfolio. But the through-put has been very slow with advisors and clients. We’re trying to lubricate that a little.”
The fact remains, he said, that in BlackRock’s world, where investors can find funds that charge for five to eight basis points, the cost and complexity of annuities loom large.
Ameriprise ‘adaptive withdrawal’
Gumer Alvero, executive vice president for annuities at Ameriprise, said that his advisors are more focused on encouraging “adaptive withdrawal” from investment portfolios as an income strategy for retirees and that “the consumer isn’t looking” for things like variable annuities with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits, given the fees and complexities.
“We’ve had a variety of GLWBs [guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits], but we’re seeing only about a 20% take-rate on contracts with the richer benefits,” he said. “The industry is going for another arms races in the opposite direction” as the public.
“I’m surprised to see the recent sales increase, because I think they’re missing the boat.” Alvero told RIJ that high payout rates on living benefits don’t appeal to retirees “because they don’t want to spend their money that fast.”
In general, Ameriprise practices the “floor and upside” approach to retirement income planning, where the retiree meets essential expenses with guaranteed or safe income. The balance of savings can be invested in risky assets. The withdrawal rate will vary, depending on market conditions. “Four percent is only the most conservative withdrawal rate over 30 years,” he said. “You could have withdrawn 15% a year from savings if you happened to retire at the right time.”
T. Rowe Price: Enough balance sheet?
George Riedel of T. Rowe Price, one of the big-three providers (with Fidelity and Vanguard) of target date funds to 401(k) participants, said that his firm has “hundreds of people looking at what embedding annuities in 401(k) plans might mean.” He sees a mismatch between the costs of annuities and the current priorities of large plan sponsors, who are focused on minimizing the costs of their plans.
If millions of 401(k) participants decided to annuitize part of their savings, he noted, life insurers wouldn’t be able to handle all the longevity risk. “Is there enough balance sheet in America?” he asked. (That helps explain Social Security; it takes a national government to handle a nation’s collective longevity risk.)
T. Rowe Price, which specializes in actively managed funds, faces the challenge faced by all asset managers who distribute mutual funds through 401(k) plans: How to deal with the ongoing flood of dollars from plan accounts to rollover IRAs. The only solution is to get their products on the shelves of the broker-dealers who manage IRA money.
James Comey: ‘You have to interrupt him’
The former FBI director, who says he was fired in 2017 for refusing to pledge his loyalty to Donald Trump, compared him unfavorably with former Presidents Obama and George W. Bush and with candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney. A leader needs to be able to listen, especially to dissenting opinions, “but to speak to [Trump] you have to interrupt him,” Comey said.
Obama, he continued, once asked him into the Oval Office and, after shooing everyone else from the room, asked for Comey’s views on the spike in police shootings of black men in U.S. cities.
“He didn’t speak for 10 minutes. He just drank it in, and then he asked questions. It was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. Actual listening happens very rarely in Washington. Instead, one person will say what they want to say, and then the other person will ignore it and say what they want to say.”
Note: At the top of this story, a link was drawn between demutualization and the industry’s current troubles. In the 1990s, many large members of the life insurance industry chose to become public companies and to shed their captive sales forces.
It’s arguable that, at that point, the policyholders began to take a backseat to the shareholder and to the third-party distributors on whom the industry began relying for sales. Since then, the resulting conflicts keep bubbling up, like rust through a thin coat of paint. The ghost of demutualization and its consequences, including a loss of public trust, haunt much of the annuity industry today.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights returned.
Honorable Mention
Arthur Laffer, the supply-sider, dabbles in financial wellness
My Financial Coach, the robo-advisor co-founded by “supply-side” economist Arthur Laffer, has launched a website designed to help employees coordinate and their personal assets with their employer-provided benefits.
A Yale- and Stanford-educated economist who leaped onto the national stage as an advisor to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Laffer provided academic support for the notion that, if extremely high taxes can discourage economic activity and reduce tax revenues, extremely low taxes could do the opposite.
Republican intellectuals, officials and policymakers from Jude Wanniski to David Stockman to George W. Bush and Donald Trump have used the idea to justify dramatic tax cuts. But the policy uniformly produced budget deficits, not increases in revenues–as in Kansas under Governor Sam Brownback in 2012.
The MFC program is a corporate-sponsored group benefit that enables employees to
- Turn to Certified Financial Planners (CFP) as financial coaches for independent fiduciary advice, then self-invest, or
- Use our financial coaches to augment work with the employee’s existing advisors
- Use our coaching service to access subject matter experts for help with financial planning and implementation.
Principals of MFC include Laffer, Chris Cruttenden of Cruttenden Partners, William L. MacDonald, and Andy Ramey.
Enpo Tu, newly appointed chief operating officer of MFC, Tu was a planner for LearnVest, a financial representative for Bank of America, and a financial consultant for AXA-Advisors.
The company’s CFPs serve as unbiased, non-selling coaches. A support team of subject matter experts (SME) includes retirement planners, money managers, insurance experts, estate planning lawyers, and tax specialists. Both CFPs and SMEs work with the employer’s human resources team. Users access live chat, phone and email on mobile and desktop platforms, and 24/7 email support for advice and information.
Through a single access point, MFC’s SmartTech system lets view
- Financial accounts
- Tax and legal documents
- Insurance coverages
- Investments
- Annuities
- Individual retirement accounts
- 401(k)s
- Employer compensation and benefits plans
- Stock options
- Restricted stock units and shares
- Real estate holdings
- Estate planning documents
- Wills, trusts and deeds.
Users can store all documents in an online vault and collaborate with their coach or other advisors remotely.
BBVA launches robo-advice tool on BNY Mellon Pershing platform
SmartPath Digital Portfolios, a new digital advice solution available on BNY Mellon Pershing’s advisory platform, has been launched by BBVA Wealth Solutions to help “investment advisors achieve increased efficiencies and scale” and to help investors choose from “a selection of managed account options.”
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) is the second largest bank in Spain. It was formed from a merger of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya and Argentaria in 1999. The company is a constituent of the IBEX 35 and Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
“We provide actively managed models that leverage non-proprietary ETFs,” said Bruce Hagemann, head of Investment Services for BBVA Compass and CEO of BWS (BBVA Wealth Solutions). The system assesses clients according to five different risk models, a BBVA release said.
SmartPath Digital Portfolios uses a risk tolerance and time horizon-based questionnaire to help clients choose investments. It charges an annual asset-based fee of 0.75% (i.e., $75 on the minimum $10,000 initial investment). There are no additional trading or rebalancing fees.
SmartPath Digital Portfolios is based on Pershing’s Digital Portfolios, which integrates Pershing’s investor platform, NetXInvestor, with the firm’s investment advisory solutions. SmartPath leverages Lockwood WealthStart Portfolios, which is designed to serve “emerging and mass affluent” investors rather than high net worth investors. It incorporates five out of six WealthStart models with traditional and nontraditional asset classes, leveraging non-proprietary ETFs.
Pershing’s Digital Portfolios is based on plug-and-play software that provides Pershing clients with full customization options and can be reconfigured based on specific client needs.
Migration to bonds finally reverses: TrimTabs
Bond funds, battered by months of losses, are on track for their first outflow in almost two years and their biggest monthly outflow in nearly three years, according to a new report from TrimTabs Research.
But bond mutual funds and exchange-traded funds have shed $23.6 billion in October through Friday, October 19. This month’s outflow is set to be the first since December 2016 and the largest since at least December 2015, when bond funds lost $24.1 billion.
“The Fed isn’t the one only cutting back on its bond holdings, and the recent selling by fund investors is a massive change in trend,” said David Santschi, Director of Liquidity Research at TrimTabs.
Before October, bond funds had 21 consecutive monthly inflows. Moreover, investors pumped a staggering $829.2 billion into bond funds in the five years ended in September.
Months of losses are finally catching up to bond funds. Bond funds are down 1.0% in October, bringing their year-to-date losses to 4.0%.
At the sector level, corporate bond funds have been sold much harder than Treasury bond funds this month despite similar performance. Corporate-bond ETFs have shed $5.8 billion (3.7% of assets)—including a five-day outflow that was the biggest on record—as they have dropped 1.4%. By contrast, Treasury bond ETF flows have been flat even though these funds are down 1.6%.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
Brighthouse makes it easier for advisors to sell its annuities
Brighthouse Financial has launched the Brighthouse Financial Digital Desk, an online platform designed for firms to help their advisors process fixed annuity sales.
Advisors can use Digital Desk to educate clients about fixed deferred and fixed income annuities and to demonstrate the value of those products in a client’s portfolio. Advisors can submit a suitability questionnaire and application electronically for faster processing and issue.
“This can help firms without a fixed suitability process in place, allowing them to add fixed and income products to their shelf,” said Myles Lambert, chief distribution and marketing officer, Brighthouse Financial, in a release.
The Digital Desk supports four Brighthouse Financial fixed and income annuities, including its new Brighthouse Fixed Rate Annuity and Brighthouse Fixed Rate Annuity MVA (market value-adjusted). The platform also supports the Brighthouse Income Annuity and Brighthouse Guaranteed Income Builder fixed deferred income annuity.
© 2018 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.