Investment Product and Service Launches

Ubiquity Retirement + Savings Makes ESG Options Available to 401(k) Plans

Ubiquity Retirement + Savings has added environmental, social and governance (ESG) fund options to its 401(k) offerings, allowing plan sponsors to incorporate socially responsible investments into their plan’s fund menus.

Ubiquity’s turnkey ESG investment lineup includes low-cost mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) from Vanguard and is currently available for participants in the firm’s Custom(k) and Reserve(k) plans.

“Just like personal values, investment strategies are not one-size-fits all,” says Chad Parks, founder and CEO of Ubiquity. “With our new socially responsible investment portfolio, small business owners can empower employees with the opportunity to save for the future while applying their savings toward the causes they care about most.”

“Ultimately, it’s about the power of choice,” says Ashvin Prakash, Ubiquity’s director of product development. “Offering these options in 401(k)s will give small businesses everywhere a competitive edge and help promote plan participation.”

For more information, visit myubiquity.com.

HSBC Launches AI Powered Multi Asset Index

HSBC has launched the AI Powered Multi Asset Index (AiMAX), which it says is the first rules-based multi-asset investment strategy to use artificial intelligence (AI) as a method for constructing a diversified growth portfolio.

The introduction of AiMAX follows HSBC’s launch of AiPEX, an AI-powered stock index family using IBM Watson. HSBC says that since going live on August 9, 2019, the AiPEX Total Return Index (AIPEXTR) has outperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by 4.79 percentage points.

AiMAX was developed in collaboration with EquBot, an asset manager that developed an AI-based exchange-traded fund (ETF) and uses IBM Watson Discovery to retrieve and analyze millions of data points, from both traditional sources such as financial statements and non-traditional sources such as social media posts.

By building intuition and experience from historical information, and continuously learning as new information becomes available, AiMAX constructs a diversified portfolio of assets whose prices are poised for growth. AiMAX invests across 15 asset classes, spanning five investable asset types (developed equities, developed bonds, emerging markets, real assets and inflation assets) and a cash index.

“This is a new approach to multi-asset investing that combines cutting edge AI techniques and a time-tested diversification strategy to balance risk and return,” says David Odenath, head of quantitative investment solutions, Americas at HSBC Global Banking and Markets. “By using AI and big data to improve the accuracy of our capital markets assumptions, we are able to deliver a next generation asset allocation strategy to our clients.”