Tag: Defined benefit

Liability-driven investing is growing more important as pension plans broadly move into a phase where they are not growing but instead need to be focused on meeting their benefit obligations.

The increasing prevalence of automatic enrollment and solutions making 401(k) plan assets more easily portable are two reasons why DC plan outcomes can compete with DB plan results.

Significant transformation is happening in the small business retirement plan market; what does this mean for the fiduciary adviser community?

Democratic Senator Patty Murray says her bill would be a strong first step toward addressing some of the key hurdles facing women as they save for retirement in defined contribution plans; there are also proposed protections for part time workers and lower income individuals. 

According to Josh Cohen, a big part of PGIM’s strategy as a DCIO provider is to foster conversations across plan sponsors’ own organizations, “presenting them with a framework for frank and practical discussions between the HR and finance functions.”

Once again this year, in an attempt to minimize the number of surveys we ask you to complete, we have combined the Top 100 questionnaire with our annual Retirement Plan Adviser Survey. The deadline has been extended through the end of the day.

Of the 12% of institutional investor respondents to a recent survey who have incorporated ESG, most are DC plans, and more than half are healthcare-focused organizations.

Greg Hahn, founder and chief investment officer at Winthrop Capital Management, offers some timely analysis on the flattening of the yield curve and navigating a rising interest rate environment.

“What actually is a strategic plan termination?” This is a question Dan Kravitz hears quite a lot from both defined benefit plan sponsors and retirement specialist advisers.

Adjustments made to the corporate tax rate, repatriation of offshore cash and interest rate deductibility all are likely to have immediate effects on the credit markets—and by extension, on institutional investors’ fixed-income portfolios.

Vanguard analysts have published a new framework to help guide retirees as they set investment goals, define their risk budget, plan for health care expenses, and tackle other challenging tasks.  

By the end of the calendar year 2017, the discount rate used by companies sponsoring pension plans in the S&P 500 had fallen to the lowest level measured in Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s long-running pension research series; at the same time, sponsors are making large voluntary contributions to take advantage of disappearing tax incentives. 

According to data from CEM Benchmarking, defined benefit pensions have outperformed defined contribution plans by less than half a percentage point over the last decade—described as a “huge improvement” for DC plan sponsors.

This is down from 59% in 1998, according to Willis Towers Watson

A new bill in the California legislature would offer new state employees a 401(k)-style plan in which their own contributions would be fully matched by the state.