Products September 29, 2021

The Standard Introduces Accelerate for Small Retirement Plans

Its features include an online Quick Start tool for plan quoting and optional investment fiduciary services from Morningstar.

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Standard Retirement Services Inc. has announced the launch of Accelerate, a new 401(k) recordkeeping solution designed to meet the needs of retirement plans with up to $2 million in assets.

“We conducted market research that revealed a significant opportunity for us to scale our expertise and service-first culture to meet the needs of small plans,” says Rob Baumgarten, vice president of retirement plan sales at The Standard. “There is a big opportunity to enhance small plan relationships that might have felt limited in their retirement plan options. Through partnerships with TPAs [third-party administrators], Accelerate provides peace of mind by creating efficiencies and delivering a superior experience for our clients.”

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According to The Standard, Accelerate offers a platform that can accommodate plan growth without time-consuming conversions; an online Quick Start tool for quick and easy plan quoting; flexibility in providing a range of investment options; optional investment fiduciary services from Morningstar; and a designated account manager for point-of-contact.

“Accelerate was created with ease of use in mind, allowing advisers and TPAs to use thoughtfully designed resources for their small plan clients,” says Jody Meth, senior director of retirement plan product management at The Standard. “In addition to its intuitive quoting process and streamlined onboarding and reporting tools, Accelerate is powered by our clean data technology to ensure errors are caught early—increasing accuracy, saving time and reducing risks.”

Baumgarten adds, “Serving small retirement plans is nothing new for The Standard, but, with Accelerate, we can provide small plans a level of service typically reserved for larger plans at a competitive price.”

Break from the Grind September 29, 2021

Ever Wonder What Bacteria Is in That Wad of Gum You Stepped On?

The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize winners have been announced.

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While many in the science community have been focused on issues related to COVID-19, research has continued on items that aren’t related to the pandemic—or anything else in the news.

For example, have you ever been grossed out by the thought of germs in the discarded gum you may have stepped on? Scientists Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú and Manuel Porcar have been awarded the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize in Ecology for using genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements in various countries.

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Or maybe you’ve wondered why humans have evolved facial hair or beards. During the ceremony on September 9, Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway and David Carrier were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face.

Other prizes included:

  • Chemistry Prize: Jörg Wicker, Nicolas Krauter, Bettina Derstroff, Christof Stönner, Efstratios Bourtsoukidis, Achim Edtbauer, Jochen Wulf, Thomas Klüpfel, Stefan Kramer and Jonathan Williams, for chemically analyzing the air inside movie theaters, to test whether the odors produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behavior, drug use and bad language in the movie the audience is watching.
  • Economics Prize: Pavlo Blavatskyy, for discovering that the obesity of a country’s politicians may be a good indicator of that country’s corruption.
  • Physics Prize: Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi and Federico Toschi, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.
  • Kinetics Prize: Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama and Katsuhiro Nishinari, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians.

And the Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Olcay Cem Bulut, Dare Oladokun, Burkard Lippert and Ralph Hohenberger for suggesting an alternative to decongestants for those with a stuffy nose.

Improbable Research says the Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people laugh, and then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology. More information about the 2021 winners is available here.

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