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Ensuring that participants live well in retirement
At the inaugural Pensions & Investments series of conferences on retirement income solutions, plan sponsors gained insights into this developing area of plan provision from experts in the field
The P&I Retirement Income Solutions conference was held twice in the final week of Ocotber, in Chicago on October 28 and New York City on October 30. The seven sponsoring organizations, AllianceBernstein, Barclays Global Investors and MelLife, Lincoln Financial Group, Prudential, and UBS Global Asset Management and Genworth Financial took the opportunity to describe the various retirement income solutions available today, those in the works for the future, and why plan sponsors ought to spend some time considering what the best route through would be for their plan participants.
Conference moderator Chris Lyon, a panner at Rocaton Investment Advisors, launched the morning session by describing the need to focus on the distribution phase of defined contribution (DC) plans. After many years of focus on the accumulation phase, he explained, it was now time to consider what plan participants were going to do with the funds accumulated. Experience shows that they are not always prudent when it comes to a pension pot far larger than any sum they have ever seen, even though it will be needed to fund their expenses over potentially many years of retirement. And with this, Lyon turned the floor over to Steve Moen of Genworth Financial to introduce the first workshop.
A team from UBS Global Asset Management and Genworth Financial kicked off the proceedings by walking attendees through a history of the development of accumulation and accumulation solutions for DC plans. Matthew Ketchum, defined contribution specialist and Cindy Vogl, senior product manager from UBS, showed the risks to participants and by extension plan sponsors of not doing anything to face the issues surrounding decumulation. After showing that pension solutions have almost come full circle, from the 'we'll do it for you' approach of defined benefit plans, DC plans now offer a range of solutions from auto-enrollment and auto-escalation to institutional-like investment options, and are now adding ways to translate accumulation into retirement security. Fred Conley, president of the institutional retirement group at Genworth Financial, rounded out the presentation by describing the guaranteed income...