Products September 22, 2015

NextCapital Offers More Personalization in 401(k) Advice

The upgraded platform allows 401(k) plan participants to manage their entire financial picture.
Reported by

NextCapital has upgraded its 401(k) Digital Advice Platform to offer participants more personalization and simplicity.

The new platform, which now includes portfolio tracking, account aggregation and a simplified user interface, allows plan participants to centralize and manage their entire financial picture, all around their 401(k). “You can’t plan for retirement without seeing all your accounts, and the 401(k) is the primary place where 88 million Americans save for retirement,” says John Patterson, chief executive officer of NextCapital.

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The new user experience is designed to create a personal retirement income target for each retirement saver. The application creates a personalized retirement plan for each 401(k) participant, including retirement savings rate and portfolio recommendations, a wealth and spend-down forecast, and Social Security projection. It also provides personal savings advice on how much a participant should contribute to their 401(k) each month, and will auto-escalate a participant’s savings rate over time.

The application creates a personalized portfolio, automatically implements, monitors and rebalances the portfolio—all done through connectivity to multiple recordkeepers. Additionally, NextCapital’s OpenEngine advice system allows partners to provide their advice methodology inside of the NextCapital Digital Advice Platform.

The application provides participants with a holistic financial dashboard, which provides key performance, risk, asset allocation and forecasting metrics.

The 401(k) Digital Advice Platform also has new connectivity to an expanding number of 401(k) recordkeeping systems. This expanded recordkeeping connectivity enables not only personalized planning by individual participants but bulk re-enrollment of all plan participants into a plan’s qualified default investment alternative (QDIA).

The firm has just implemented its first institutional partner, Russell Investments, and it is now beginning to roll out the service through the 401(k) plan adviser marketplace.

More information about NextCapital is at www.nextcapital.com.
Data and Research September 22, 2015

Middle-Age Americans Least Confident About Affording Retirement

Also, women have more doubts than men about their ability to afford the life they want during retirement.
Reported by

More than half (52%) of Americans have doubts about their ability to afford the life they want during retirement, according to an August survey by GfK of more than 23,000 people in 19 countries.

In the U.S., nearly six in 10 of those in their 40s (55%) and those in their 50s (58%) are not fully confident they will have the funds they need. Less than half of Americans in their 30s (49%) and age 60 or older (45%) are not fully confident.                    

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The survey finds U.S. women are much more uncertain or pessimistic about their retirement finances than men, with 60% saying they are unsure or not confident, compared to 41% of men.

Globally, the countries surveyed echo feelings in the United States, with 54% of respondents worldwide uncertain about or concerned with the state of their retirement finances. Individuals in Japan, Poland and France expressed the greatest levels of concern, with 74%, 68% and 68%, respectively, saying they are either uncertain or not confident about their retirements. Respondents in China (48%) and Spain (45%) were least likely to express doubt or concern about their retirement funding.

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