PlanVisualizer Design Support Tool Launched by Empower Retirement

Empower Retirement announced that it will launch PlanVisualizer, a new adviser-support solution billed as “a powerful interactive technology that enables retirement advisers and consultants to demonstrate to plan sponsors how some modifications in plan design can impact their employees’ retirement readiness, pinpoint progress, and forecast plan contribution expenses.”

According to the firm, the new offering will be made available available through Empower’s adviser website. In a phrase, the tool is aimed at helping plan sponsors consider how possible changes to their plan—such as employer match, automatic enrollment and rate of auto-escalation—can impact their employees’ retirement prospects.

“The ultimate goal of every retirement plan is to replace income in retirement,” explains Empower President Edmund Murphy III. “PlanVisualizer is designed to help employers better see and understand how the design of their plan can help employees achieve that goal.”

PlanVisualizer aims to create a holistic view of a client’s retirement plan in its current state, along with the ability to model how changes to key design elements can potentially affect participant preparedness. Importantly, the tool also helps analyze how changes to the plan might impact matching costs for the employer.

As seen in a demonstration supplied by Empower, the PlanVisualizer technology utilizes a core set of anonymous data points supplied by the adviser or consultant (including employees’ ages, salaries, retirement plan balances and contribution rates) to provide plan sponsors with customized insight across demographic segments, including a directional sense of participants’ current trajectory to replace income in retirement.  PlanVisualizer then “makes use of Empower proprietary data which utilizes multiple individual and actuarial data points to show individuals a score of how they are faring toward income replacement in retirement.”  

Advisers and consultants can employ this technology to communicate the effect of retirement plan design changes in real time, Murphy notes.

PlanVisualizer will also be offered by Putnam Investments to assist advisers and consultants in serving their clients. In recent years, Putnam has been working on maximizing its FundVisualizer tool, a free investment analysis tool that enables advisers, brokers and other intermediaries to evaluate and compare more than 30,000 mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and indexes using more than 80 performance and risk metrics.

For more information, visit www.Empower-Retirement.com.