Products September 22, 2022

Product and Service Launches

iJoin leverages Coherent’s retirement savers product innovation tool and Purchasing Power introduces financial wellness services.

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iJoin Leverages Coherent’s Retirement Savers Product Innovation Tool

LDI-MAP (doing business as iJoin) has announced that it has selected Coherent, a global software-as-service company, to help deliver personalized options for retirement savers and enable better outcomes through faster product innovation.

Coherent Spark converts business logic, including rules, calculations and data, from any spreadsheet into an application programming interface, which can then connect to any application. This enables business and IT teams to work together to bring products to market and innovate their offerings at a faster cadence.

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With Spark, iJoin’s product team can build actuarial models for an array of managed account and guaranteed income products in spreadsheets and then convert the logic into integration-ready APIs instantly without the need for manual coding. iJoin’s actuarial team also uses Spark for robust, high-speed testing within the platform, which significantly collapses the product development cycle. Coherent Spark also includes all required security, compliance and audit-ready capabilities required to meet the stringent requirements of iJoin’s insurance industry partners.

Purchasing Power Introduces Financial Wellness Services

Purchasing Power, a voluntary benefits company, has announced a set of financial wellness services designed to provide its clients’ employees with more financial support. These services complement the core Purchasing Power employee purchasing program by enabling access to highly actionable, timely financial wellness benefits through partnerships.

Access to financial health resources made available from Chicago-based social impact fintech company SpringFour. This service enables consumers to find vetted, local nonprofit resources that can help them address some of their immediate financial challenges including childcare services, utility costs and food savings. It is provided at no cost to Purchasing Power clients and clients’ employees.

Live financial counseling and coaching is powered by Working Credit NFP, a national nonprofit also based in Chicago. The program is designed to help consumers receive personalized advice to improve and build their credit. Counselors work with employees one-on-one by Zoom to help them learn how the credit system works and create a personalized credit action plan to help them not only build and maintain a strong credit score but also support them in meeting their financial goals. Purchasing Power will offer financial coaching to employees of select clients.

With the addition of Working Credit NFP, employees will have access to credit-building workshops and 12 months of unlimited one-on-one credit-building counseling. They will have the opportunity to create a customized credit action plan including financial goal-setting, progress checkpoints, budgeting support and credit-building tips.

Products September 21, 2022

American Century Launches Income Blueprint for Plan Fiduciaries

Income Blueprint seeks to help plan fiduciaries implement a process to evaluate and choose in-plan guaranteed income products for their clients.

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American Century Investments has launched Income Blueprint to help retirement plan fiduciaries implement a process to evaluate and choose in-plan guaranteed income products.

The online tool provides a simplified view of available products and generates a customizable report that compares and scores each one according to plan preferences.

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The Income Blueprint organizes the SECURE Act’s guidance on the selection of a lifetime income provider into three steps. The first step identifies the type of insurance product based on features such as guarantees, liquidity, growth potential and fee structure. Starting the process through the lens of these features gives the Income Blueprint an objective, thorough and analytical foundation.

The second step considers costs in relation to features and benefits. In this step, users rank the importance of plan features to customize their weighting against costs. The third and final step considers the financial capability of the insurer. After the product is selected, fiduciaries must obtain written representation from the insurer and periodically review this document.

Income Blueprint users create their own personalized library of guaranteed income products and their features. The tool stores uploaded data for each individual product, including insurer documentation, for client-specific product comparisons. All information entered in Income Blueprint is saved by a specific user.

These steps are documented and result in a report, generated by Income Blueprint, that reviews the evaluation process and criteria and provides documentation for product selection. The goal, says American Century, is to provide safe harbor for fiduciaries who use Income Blueprint to advise their clients.

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