ARS is redefining retirement income with its patent-pending Lifetime Income Builder, designed to deliver better participant outcomes.
Today’s retirement income crisis is a multidimensional challenge that requires an integrated approach to product development, design, and administration. ARS is transforming the market through a smarter approach and challenging traditional thinking to deliver true income innovation.
For decades, retirement income solutions have fallen short. Providers – viewing the challenge through a single, proprietary lens – have created “first generation” solutions that force retail annuities alongside institutional investments, two product categories that were never meant to work together. The result? Product inefficiencies that forced participants to make tradeoffs on growth, control, or simplicity to gain access to guaranteed income.
ARS sought a smarter approach by re-engineering the entire concept of an income solution, and in the process created a new asset class of its own. Lifetime Income Builder was designed on a fixed indexed annuity (FIA) chassis with a guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit (GLWB), then given a daily market value to enable compatibility with investment products. When embedded within a portfolio’s glidepath, Lifetime Income Builder functions like any other investment, preserving the growth, liquidity, and simplicity that participants both want and expect.
In order to enable the revolutionary features and benefits of Lifetime Income Builder, with Trility Consulting as its technology partner, ARS has built the ARDX Platform, a proprietary middleware solution that streamlines data administration and transmission. The journey of inventing an asset class, while creating a technology platform that can be flexible enough to meet the needs of stakeholders across the value chain, has been the focus of the partnership between Trility and ARS since 2020.
It’s become a trusted partnership for Abby Canfield, ARS Head of Operations, who relies on Trility to advise on the right technology implementation because everyone on the team is clear on our goals. “Our combined organizations have invested time in truly understanding the mechanics of the product and you can tell [Trility team members] understand and are committed to ARS’ business goals,” she shared. “This type of committed understanding is unique to technology teams and instills confidence we are building the right solution. Trility is very adaptable to the model that clients want to operate within and manage.”
This model has led to several successful outcomes for the product, the business, and the partnership.
This type of committed understanding is unique to technology teams and instills confidence we are building the right solution. Trility is very adaptable to the model that clients want to operate within and manage.
Through the opportunities included in the SECURE Act of 2019, ARS designed a target date fund (TDF) series structured as a collective investment trust with the power to get you not just to retirement. The solution embeds Lifetime Income Builder as an asset class and is designed to help participants optimize growth potential, and when the time comes, generate guaranteed income that will last a lifetime*. For plan sponsors, it provides a qualified default investment alternative (QDIA) compliant structure and a combination of liquidity, portability, and ease of use that other income solutions often lack.
Canfield is responsible for regularly reporting to ARS executive stakeholders and the Board of Directors. “This is truly the first time in my career where technology is ahead of the non-technical related work and has not created a problem in achieving timelines,” shared Canfield. “It’s not common to have a partner be as flexible, adaptable, and responsive as Trility. It’s helping ARS achieve its speed-to-market goals,” she shared, reporting they reduced implementation time, end-to-end, by 40 percent.
This is truly the first time in my career where technology is ahead of the non-technical related work and has not created a problem in achieving timelines.
According to Product Owner, Evan Sasso, “Trility’s approach begins by truly understanding the intended business value. This process has allowed the team to make the right technical design recommendations the first time rather than through several starts and stops. ARS’ business model is very tech driven. The ease and efficiency of integration is really a huge part of ARS’ client value.”
The innovative Lifetime Income Builder product requires a nimble technical solution to connect all parties involved in the offering. The underlying technology Trility and ARS have architected ensures efficient and strong adaptability to the ecosystems of the five distinct user groups required to administer a single product. According to Canfield, Trility has helped ARS scale the ARDX platform by offering the Lifetime Income Builder product suite across these user groups despite each having their own unique roles, technical environments, and constant competing priorities when it comes to technical resources.
“When we meet with prospective customers to pitch the product and the next step is technical integration, we consistently hear, ‘We can do that without much lift.’ This is a major testament to the underlying technology. Our goal is to change how Americans retire and we want to ensure that once a recordkeeper integrates with the ARDX platform, there’s very little – if any – incremental technology impact. Reducing the load to offer the full Lifetime Income Builder product suite ultimately influences participant adoption,” she said.
New and different business needs have surfaced as adoption has grown and engagement with the ARDX platform has increased across user groups. As an example, insurers using the platform have interest in receiving additional data points that can be used for FIA product valuation and risk management purposes, however, these data points may not be relevant or necessary for asset managers. To solve for this form of customization, the ARS and Trility teams have creatively designed the ability to manage administrative needs by user group without creating inefficiency in architecture. Sasso expressed, “Providing these key features to one party without making it a requirement and potentially even a burden for other users is critical and demonstrates the flexibility we want inherent in our system.”
The key for ARS is to ensure that the system delivers the intended end-to-end business value. ARS provides these assurances to their customers and end users through thorough testing. As ARS was ramping up a user acceptance testing (UAT) team to ensure internal and customer facing quality assurance, they required a stable environment. “As a proponent of test-driven development (converting business requirements to test cases before the code is written), Trility could have taken the stance that UAT is a burden,” shared Sasso. Instead, “Trility worked with ARS to automate a repository for the UAT team to write automation for their internal testing of outcomes,” he said. “This not only accelerated the testing cycle, but provided the transparency needed to ARDX user groups to confirm, validate business outcomes, and even meet regulatory requirements.” He added, “This is a great illustration of Trility’s commitment to its customers’ needs. It provides efficiency in our overall throughput and is a tangible example of true partnership.”
For Sasso, once ARS validated that it architected the system to deliver the right business outcomes, the stability and reliability of the technology was most critical. In a fast-paced, highly-regulated industry like the one ARS is serving, you simply cannot spend valuable time and resources on disruptions to production. Thanks to Trility’s forward-looking team and design capabilities, ARS has launched a highly secure, well-controlled technology stack that ARS and its customers can count on.
Canfield shares in Sasso’s sentiments, “I’m proud of how our technology performs, because ARS rarely experiences disruptions on the platform. It’s easy for me to deliver the services we promise to our customers and consistently hit service levels. This allows ARS to focus our time with our customers on what we do best, which is deliver innovative product solutions to the marketplace.”
I’m proud of how our technology performs, because ARS rarely experiences disruptions on the platform. It’s easy for me to deliver the services we promise to our customers and consistently hit service levels. This allows ARS to focus our time with our customers on what we do best, which is deliver innovative product solutions to the marketplace.
ARS continues to lead the industry in lifetime income solutions administered by the ARDX platform. The business and technology teams remain focused on enabling faster, seamless fund enablement, and processing capabilities for recordkeepers.
ARS has most recently joined forces with Global Trust Company and State Street Global Advisors – the world’s fourth largest asset manager – to deliver the second target date fund with Lifetime Income Builder for the defined contribution (DC) plan marketplace. This target date series combines State Street Global Advisors’ cost-efficient asset management expertise with ARS’ patent-pending lifetime income innovation to help Americans become more retirement-ready. Global Trust Company is the fiduciary and trustee of the Series’ investment vehicle. As a multi-carrier model, the series will tap into some of the nation’s top-tier insurance carriers to guarantee lifetime income* and will be available across multiple recordkeeping platforms.
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*Guarantees are/Lifetime income is subject to the claims paying ability of the insurance carriers that offer the fixed indexed annuity on which Lifetime Income Builder was designed.
