Defined contribution plan carriers want to increase awareness of evolving product offerings, meet emerging client and employee needs, as well as improve long-term relationships with participant investors. To generate the most value from investments, DC plan sponsors find it critical to have enhanced and augmented capabilities across the board—including in enrollment, investor education, and compliance testing, among others.
A continuing challenge in the DC plan space is to ensure that plan participants sufficiently contribute toward a comfortable retirement. Investor education is an ongoing process and must accommodate a variety of participant expertise. The addition of new and more complex products further complicate investor education efforts.
Recently, carriers have boosted BI and analytics initiatives focused on current plan participants. These efforts can be critical to growing plan retention and providing value-added services.
Across the board, the current area of most interest is the portal—plan advisor portals, plan sponsor portals, plan participant portals in this case. Technology investments and initiatives aim to leverage portals as a means to facilitate financial planning, manage lengthy and complex sales processes, and disseminate financial wellness information.
Carriers seek to transform advisor and participant portals into sources for educational materials—articles and, more than ever, video content. For sponsors, carriers look to add tools for and guidance around designing plans. The hope is that these features can keep plan sponsors from treating the platform management as something driven based on cost alone; and that they will add value for employees and improve perceptions of the employer in the insurance industry knowledge market. Portal self-service capabilities for both plan sponsors and participants are also of interest.
For more on business and technology trends and challenges in defined contribution retirement plan space, see our latest report on the topic.
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