Lifetime Income

As employers increasingly turn to defined contribution plans to fulfill their employees’ rising needs for retirement income, the demand for new solutions and products has exploded. Financial institutions, advisory firms, and annuity providers, have responded with an extensive commitment to developing and launching new solutions to address this growing demand.

Sorting through and comparing these solutions’ details and their relative effectiveness is challenging for plan sponsors, fiduciaries, and their service providers. Doing so may be very different from procedures they’ve adopted to govern plan investments that focus on saving for retirement. This makes it difficult to implement an informed and prudent process for assessing, comparing, integrating, and monitoring retirement income solutions.

Congress provided a clear roadmap with the “Fiduciary Safe Harbor for Selection of Lifetime Income Provider” in the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act (SECURE Act). The SECURE Act safe harbor helps fiduciaries to identify the safest available way to select and monitor lifetime income solutions and shows product developers how they’ll be evaluated. Fiduciary Law Center’s team is built to help plan sponsors, fiduciaries, and service providers through this unfamiliar – yet necessary – landscape.

Fiduciary Law Center’s team of attorneys has extensive knowledge of the solutions’ nuts and bolts, SECURE Act safe harbor, and the steps required of fiduciaries, including:

Fiduciary Law Center’s team also has worked on the front lines of lifetime income product development, with experience in the following areas and beyond: