Launched five years ago, Ernst & Young's Retirement Income Knowledge Bank has become a useful map of the competitive landscape for insurers and broker-dealers.
Sales began going up after Fidelity incorporated SPIAs into its online retirement planning tools: the Income Strategy Evaluator and the Guaranteed Income Estimator.
"How America Saves," now in its 10th edition, is a compilation of data from Vanguard's 2,000 defined contribution plans, which cover three million participants with about $400 billion in assets.
While smaller than most of the other 15 companies on the list (see today's Data Connection), Life Insurance Co. of the Southwest, Royal Neighbors of America and The Standard have strong ratings--and a whiff of counter-culture about them.
The annual J. D. Power and Associates U.S. Full Service Investor Satisfaction Survey also found that most people don't understand the difference between the "fiduciary" and "suitability" standards of advisor conduct.
In Washington, AARP's CEO denied earlier statements by his own policy chief that the organization was open to future cuts in Social Security benefits if the cuts made the PAYGO system more financially sustainable.
Brief and late-breaking items from DTCC, Fidelity, MetLife, Charles Schwab, Strategic Insight, PLANSPONSOR, Sun Life Financial, Lincoln Financial Distributors, John Hancock and Retirement Plan Advisory Group.
Positive articles about annuities are certainly welcome—especially at a time when a relentless interest-rate drought is desiccating their value—but recent pieces in Barron's and the New York Times didn't advance the annuity dialogue very far.