Editorial Staff, Author at Retirement Income Journal

Published July 20, 2017

'Each group will have a leader focused on understanding customer needs, experiences and expectations, and applying that understanding to capture growth opportunities within and across businesses,' said a Prudential...

Betterment adds socially-responsible portfolio option

Published July 20, 2017

A 42% improvement in social responsibility over Betterment's existing portfolio came from substituting iShares DSI—a broad US ESG stock market ETF—for the portfolio's U.S. large cap exposures, Betterment said.

Total Assets Indexed or Benchmarked to S&P Dow Jones Indices

By Editorial Staff Thu, Jul 13, 2017

1Q2017 bank annuity fee income up 4.2% from 1Q2016

By Editorial Staff Fri, Jul 7, 2017

Of 624 bank holding companies (BHC), 280 or 44.9% sold annuities during first quarter 2017. Their $788.5 million in annuity commissions and fees constituted 35.1% of total BHC insurance...

Honorable Mention

Brief or late-breaking items about Northwestern Mutual and the NFL, Milliman's robo-human hybrid research and Voya's new 401k chief.

KeyCorp buys HelloWallet from Morningstar

By Editorial Staff Thu, Jul 6, 2017

The $134.5 billion bank holding company may be the first bank to move into the financial wellness space, which has been dominated by retirement companies. Financial terms of the...

Lawsuit accuses oil and gas firm of not using Vanguard’s cheapest funds

Participants in Pioneer Natural Resources USA's 401(k) plan accuse the sponsor of offering them Vanguard's retail share class funds instead of institutional share class funds and failing to negotiate...

Evaluations of the 10 Largest Health Savings Account Plans

By Editorial Staff Thu, Jun 29, 2017

Nationwide’s new ‘Care Concierge’ program fills an advisory vacuum

The program extends Nationwide's internal employee assistance benefits, such as health advocacy, counseling and access to legal services, to owners of certain Nationwide variable annuity products.

Happy Independence Day

Retirement Income Journal will take a one-week recess to celebrate the July 4 national holiday and will not appear on July 6. We will return to our weekly publishing...

Only one of the 10 largest HSAs gets great grades: Morningstar

Morningstar evaluated HSAs from Alliant Credit Union, Bank of America, BenefitWallet, HealthEquity, HealthSavings Administrators, HSA Bank, Optum Bank, SelectAccount, The HSA Authority, and UMB Bank.

Honorable Mention

Brief or late-breaking items from Accenture, Envestnet, T. Rowe Price, Voya Financial, Ernst & Young and Cerulli Associates.

Potential Applications of Inorganic Intelligence

By Editorial Staff Thu, Jun 22, 2017

Reminder: Solve our retirement income case

Last week we presented the case of a couple, ages 64 and 63, with over $1 million in investable assets but no clue as to how to generate retirement...

Wealthfront angles for upmarket clients

The robo-advice firm has launched Advanced Indexing, a service that holds individual stocks to reduce costs and enhance 'tax-loss harvesting.' There are two levels of service, for clients with...

Research supports investing Social Security funds in equities

“Investing a portion (a maximum of 40%) of Social Security trust fund assets in equities would reduce the need for greater payroll tax contributions or benefit reductions,” said a...

Most advisors still many megabytes shy of a digital practice, says Fidelity (owner of eMoney)

Only 40% of advisors are tech-savvy, according to the Fidelity 2016 eAdvisor Study sponsored by Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions (FCCS), a unit of Fidelity Investments.