New York Life Tool Gauges Retirement Readiness

The dashboard is designed to determine a plan participant’s level of retirement readiness, as well as model plan changes that may increase those levels of readiness. Lynda Abend, chief data officer at New York Life Retirement Plan Services, tells PLANSPONSOR, “We incorporate defined contribution, defined benefit and Social Security benefits. Benefits are projected to Social Security normal retirement age. Plan features such as managed savings are included in the projections. We assume a fixed investment return. Plan changes are factored in to the projection model to show impact on retirement income.”

In addition, the dashboard shows how prepared participants are for retirement when compared to industry peers and all other New York Life retirement clients, and allows segmentation by participant age, tenure, salary and division. The dashboard also features interactive tools to model how adding features (including automatic enrollment, automatic escalation or changes in corporate match) will affect participant readiness.

“The interactive tool allows plan sponsors to model the impact of adding auto-enrollment, managed savings and auto-sweep features to a plan,” says the Westwood, Massachusetts-based Abend. “The plan design features are included in the income projections and show the impact on retirement readiness from the current plan design. Through our consulting services, we also provide the cost of such features.”

Since 2012, New York Life has launched a series of dashboards that allow plan sponsors to evaluate core components of their plan including participant behavior and utilization of plan investments, plan enrollment and savings rates by participant demographic, and the success of participant communication efforts.

Patrick Murphy, CEO of New York Life Retirement Plan Services, says that digital tools such as the dashboards enable plan sponsors and advisers to access core plan data and analysis, which in turn allows other consults and service providers to act on the information. “Empowering participants to retire with sufficient assets is likely the most important metric by which a sponsor can judge the plan’s success,” he adds.

The Retirement Readiness Dashboard is only available to clients of New York Life. Plan sponsors should contact their plan adviser to obtain more information regarding the dashboard.

New York Life Retirement Plan Services offers bundled retirement plan solutions and defined contribution investment only products throughout the United States. More information about the firm can be found at http://www.nylinvestments.com/retirement.