There is a perception that robo advisors in the financial services industry are more commonly employed in portfolio management for asset accumulation. While Schneider will provide an overview of robo advisors in the financial services industry, McGuiness will provide insight on the application of robo advisory methods to the “decumulation” side of the retirement planning equation applying an actuarial approach to help guide near retirees, retirees and their advisors to a holistic retirement strategy. 

If your organization is considering a robo advisor strategy, is the future now?

Historically, traditional defined benefit (DB) plans often included provisions so that employees continued to earn pension credit during periods of long term disability. Over time, defined contribution (DC) plans have become the primary retirement plan for many employers. However, in that transition, the connection of disability protection linked to the pension benefits was often forgotten. Today there is usually no disability protection linked to DC retirement plans. The impact is that retirement security is derailed. This session will evaluate opportunities to fix this gap and will provide an overview of disability coverage-related issues.

The cost of health care, particularly long-term care, is the biggest fear of people that are approaching and planning for retirement. Yet, few people adequately plan for or protect against this risk. This session will explore some of the root causes for this disconnect, which range from consumer attitudes, lack of attractive financial product designs, risk selection, and distribution challenges. The session will also present new product concepts that have emerged as the industry has made strides to innovate in this space over the last few years, and what will need to happen with distribution to bring such products to consumers.

Before we meet with anyone these days, from a potential new hire to a new colleague, most of us check them out on LinkedIn. So what does your profile say about you? To be a leader in a digital world, you’ve got to be a digitally savvy leader. And looking your best on LinkedIn is a critical part of your digital footprint. That’s why now is the time to rethink how you’re leveraging one of the world’s most powerful professional platforms. Business leaders with fully optimized LinkedIn profiles have 40 times more opportunities. In this fast-paced session, Dr. Debra Jasper and Betsy Hubbard, founders of Mindset Digital, will demonstrate how to use LinkedIn to expand your network and enhance your professional brand, write an effective summary, and share content that keeps you top of mind.

This breakfast and interactive session will focus on current retirement topics impacting the Canadian market and is open to all attendees interested in Canadian-specific issues. 

(Pre-registration is required for this breakfast.)

Sponsored by CANNEX Financial Exchanges

In business today, change is the name of the game. Leaders everywhere are engaging in a dramatic rethink of how they compete, work, and get results. But how do you break new ground when there is so much pressure to avoid mistakes? How do you keep people confident about the future in a world that seems more uncertain than ever? In short, how do you unleash long-lasting, positive change in tough, fast-moving times? Those are some of the urgent questions addressed in this inspiring and energizing talk.

The New DOL Fiduciary Rule has arrived. Now what? LIMRA & LOMA CEO Bob Kerzner will lead a panel of industry executives charged with transforming marketing and distribution models at their organizations to adapt to what is likely one of the greatest business disrupters our industry has faced. How will retirement plan providers respond? What impact will this have on the retail market? Listen to top industry leaders discuss the challenges they see and strategies they are putting in place to conform to this new reality.

At a time of unprecedented need for individual investment and longevity risk management, the retail annuity landscape is facing pressure on multiple fronts. This is affecting product mix and manufacturer standings. In this session, LIMRA’s top annuity experts will share their views on what is driving these changes and where they see the industry’s future.

Have you ever wondered why so few participants move their old 401(k)s into their current employers’ plans? Or why so many participants prematurely cash out their retirement savings accounts, regardless of taxes and penalties? Or why job-changing participants leave their savings behind only to lose track of them — as if their assets for retirement belong on some remote desert island away from all their other savings? This session will address the question of why the need for new portability solutions is so urgent.

LIMRA’s Secure Retirement Institute and Maddock Douglas will unveil their latest consumer research insights, which examine and redefine “retirement.” What messages about retirement is our industry getting across to consumers? And how is that different from the way the middle class believes retirement (and the path towards it) will look and feel in the future? We will explore the threats that consumers worry might knock them off track from having a fulfilling lifestyle; and identify opportunity areas where financial services companies can better meet consumer needs. The session is designed for leaders seeking inspiration and ideas for innovation.

Learn how retirees view and manage post-retirement risks. This survey is the eighth in a biennial series that assesses retired and near retired persons’ attitudes towards post-retirement risk. Topics include the impact of shocks, the stages of retirement, and maintaining assets. In addition, a separate but related focus group research study explored the experiences of people who have been retired 15 to 25 years to learn what major changes and issues have confronted them along the way, and how they have adapted.

The individual annuity product landscape continues to evolve in response to the financial crisis of 2008. The steady march towards lower-risk offerings in variable annuity guarantees, the proliferation of managed-volatility indexing in fixed indexed annuities, and the competing customer-value proposition in withdrawal guarantees across variable and non-variable annuities are but a couple of trends that have recently shaped the annuity product space. Our panel of product experts will discuss these trends and their ultimate impact on your company and clients.

As far as “basic products” go, the use and design of Income Annuities continues to evolve. A recent joint study by CANNEX and LIMRA Secure Retirement Institute examines the demographics and features selected for various SPIA & DIA products over the last three years — from how they are presented and illustrated all the way through the sales pipeline to the final purchase. Learn more about who has been buying these products and how they intend to use them — including Keith.

What will the DC industry look like in the future? If consolidation is likely to continue, will there be a place for niche players who serve very targeted market segments, or who offer very specialized services? What is the role of state and federal initiatives in addressing the issue of “coverage” among private sector workers? Industry leaders discuss these key issues in our dramatically evolving industry.

Predictive models are being developed to better target clients, qualify leads, assign leads to advisors, and determine the next best offer to make a client for cross-sell or up-sell. This session will provide an overview to different predictive modeling applications in marketing and distribution. It will cover topics such as customer segmentation, customer lifetime value, propensity to buy, propensity to lapse, etc. The session is intended to serve as an introduction to predictive analytics in the retirement industry and will appeal to individuals of varying backgrounds.

When it comes to retirement planning, getting consumers to take action is hard. Uncertainty, doubt, and complexity are all obstacles to engagement. In this session, New York Life and Confident Choice LLC present a simplified process designed to motivate consumers to take action at the first stage of a sales discussion, one that combines data analytics and behavioral psychology to help them identify their needs and priorities. A key benefit is that this approach seamlessly helps both the distributor and the consumer prioritize their needs in simple, actionable terms. The result is an increased likelihood of a client sale — one that is demonstrably aligned with the consumer’s priorities.

Traditional methods of setting assumptions for annuity policyholder behavior are generally simple and based on a mix of intuition and examination of similar historical patterns. With assumptions based on predictive models, additional insight into the drivers of policyholder behavior can be uncovered, but there is a potential for overreliance on these results. Come hear about how predictive models have been applied to annuity lapse assumptions and what to look out for when using these tools.

Companies and consumers expect the Internet to be the main touch point for all aspects of retirement planning such as research, plan enrollment, changing investments, and withdrawing funds. However, more often than not consumers struggle online because the digital retirement experience does not provide what is truly needed. This session will outline areas to focus on and what key pitfalls to avoid when designing digital retirement experiences. These insights are gathered from the User Experience Center’s many years working with clients in the retirement plan industry.

With the proliferation of digital transformation in financial services and the shift to a paperless environment, the opportunity should exist for annuity new business operations to become more efficient and effective to shorten the time to issue and annuity. Attendees in this session will gain a clearer understanding of the digital transformation opportunities in annuity operations and separate the facts from the fiction.

The challenge today is no longer getting your message out. There are more options than ever: Vine, Instagram, Periscope — the list goes on. The real challenge for today’s leaders is getting your message in — getting your hyper-distracted colleagues, clients, and even your own employees to take time to engage with you. So what works? In a time of short attention spans and big expectations, this high-impact, highenergy session led by Dr. Debra Jasper and Betsy Hubbard, founders of Mindset Digital, explores what it takes to lead in a digital age, including how to:

• Leverage the latest visual storytelling techniques
• Tap into the world’s most powerful channels to recruit, connect, and share expertise
• Create fast-moving presentations that wow a crowd
• Get up to speed on what’s next (think Gen Z)

U.S. households are leaking 40 percent of the dollars that they save in 401(k) accounts. Some analysts say that the solution to this problem is to crack down on leakage. David Laibson explains why leakage may not be a problem after all. If households have trouble saving for a rainy day and 401(k)’s are the new rainy day fund (and the retirement savings account), households need to save more in the first place. The 401(k)/IRA system can have both high levels of leakage and high balances if contributions are increased. In this presentation, we’ll examine how to address these issues with higher default contributions and more aggressive use of auto-escalation.

Are you looking for new approaches to help you and your teams with everything from problem solving to strategy development? This interactive session provides an opportunity to explore innovation tools.

• Understand Design Thinking principles and how you can use them
• Use divergent and convergent thinking to unlock opportunities
• Get to the so what? Translating information into strategic ideas and concrete actions

This session will discuss the ways predictive modeling is used in actuaries’ daily work and real insurance business. Instead of a general introduction, this session will focus on the real life examples of how predictive modeling can be applied to solve the problems in business. It will touch upon data source and data clean, modeling specification and procedure, model implementation and other considerations.

The opportunity for DC record-keepers to educate America is profound and many do promote “financial literacy.” What’s at stake and what is the industry doing about it? What are the best practices and tactics that seem to be working? What is the role of the financial services industry and is there a larger, social discussion about the need for financially-literate consumers?

This session will feature an overview of Fidelity research to allow attendees to gain a better understanding of the challenges and solutions to better understand optimal retirement income solutions. Solutions to be addressed for consideration include but are not limited to: 

• Efficiency of annuities and hedging longevity risk versus ‘self-insuring’
• Identifying the uncertainty — cash flows or investment horizon
• Balancing what a client says versus what a client does (wants to do)
• Putting kale in the smoothie: finding a way to make annuities palatable

There is much in the news about changing longevity trends, from glowing reports about continued increases in longevity to other reports citing declines in longevity for particular demographic groups. Changes in longevity have a particularly significant impact on the retirement industry. This session will provide an overview of some of the recent trends and studies, highlight recent Society of Actuaries research in this area, discuss implications for the retirement industry and demonstrate a simple tool that can be used for helping individuals to better understand their own longevity risk.

Despite vast geographical, cultural, and economic differences, both China and the United States are facing many of the same challenges related to retirement — from longer lifespans to underfunded pension systems. So how do Chinese attitudes toward retirement compare to those of Americans? Based on recent LIMRA consumer research on China and the United States, this session examines the similarities and differences between these very different countries. Find out how an international perspective can improve your company’s marketing strategies.

Ever wonder what improvements could be made to your product development process? Think your time to market is best in class? Come hear results and thoughts generated from the SOA recent research on benchmarking the product development process. Diving deeper into annuity products and some life insurance used for retirement purposes, come look under the hood and determine for yourself if your process is well-oiled or in need of a tune up.