Benefit Plan Cybersecurity Considerations

The U.S. has no comprehensive national law governing cybersecurity and no uniform framework for measuring the effectiveness of protections, though retirement plan record keepers maintain the personally identifiable information on millions of workers, collecting names, birth dates, social security numbers, and beneficiaries. Plan sponsors frequently engage consultants and attorneys to help them secure sensitive data, but more work is necessary to engage a larger discussion around this issue. The SPARK Institute has outlined a flexible approach for an independent third-party reporting of cyber security capabilities with several key control objectives.

The FinTech Opportunity

FinTech covers digital innovations and technology-enabled business model innovations in the financial sector. Such innovations can disrupt existing industry structures and blur industry boundaries, facilitate strategic disintermediation, revolutionize how existing firms create and deliver products and services, provide new gateways for entrepreneurship, democratize access to financial services, but also create significant privacy, regulatory and law-enforcement challenges. This chapter assesses potential impacts of FinTech on the finance industry. First we show that financial services remain surprisingly expensive in the U.S., which helps explain the emergence of new entrants. We then argue that the current regulatory approach is subject to significant political economy and coordination costs, and therefore it is unlikely to deliver much structural change. FinTech can improve both financial stability and access to services, but this will require important changes in the focus of regulations.

The Transformation of Investment Advice

It is not surprising that the investing public seeks accessible, low-cost, and reliable advice. This chapter discusses how digital, or robo-advisors have triggered a dramatic upheaval in how investment advice is formulated, delivered, and applied on an ongoing basis to actively managed retail investment accounts. The availability of digital advice is promoting the important policy objective of expanding access to retirement advice to a growing segment of underserved and undersaved Americans. In addition to discussing the socio­economic and technological factors that are accelerating the growth of digital investment advisors, the chapter also discusses how such advisors fit within the existing legal and regulatory framework governing retail investment activities. It concludes with a look ahead anticipating how digital advice will continue to disrupt the financial services industry.

The Emergence of the Robo-Advisor

Robo-advisors are online services that use computer algorithms to provide financial advice and manage customers’ investment portfolios. This chapter describes the development of the robo-advisor industry and compares robo-advisors to traditional human financial advisors. Robo-advisors emerged in response to people’s need for financial advice and the high cost of obtaining that advice from human advisors. Pure robo-advisors, which offer no direct human contact, are generally substantially less expensive than human advisors, and the use of computer algorithms allows for an increasing degree of personalization of the advice. Nevertheless, robo-advisors do not provide customers with all of the services offered by human advisors and, in particular, human contact. In response, some firms are offering hybrid robo/human services that combine cost savings from a robo-advisor with some human input.

Designing for Older Adults: Overcoming Barriers to a Supportive, Safe, and Healthy Retirement

Older adults (65+) are at increasing risk of being ‘digitally marginalized’ due to lower tech savviness, social isolation, and few peers who can provide the needed input. As a consequence, some seniors have difficulties and are exposed to security risks when accessing essential services which are increasingly moving online. These include making critical life decisions, understanding health information, accessing health services, staying connected to families, or simply doing online shopping. This chapter investigates how online technologies can be designed to be inclusive of older adults’ needs, abilities, and contexts. Several barriers barring technology adoption include mental models; attitudes related to critical decision making; privacy concerns; and overall cyber-safety concerns preventing seniors from engaging with such resources online. We also propose ways to help the FinTech sector incorporate new approaches so that services and applications better serve the needs and constraints of older adults.

How FinTech is Reshaping the Retirement Planning Process

This volume examines how technology is transforming financial applications, and how FinTech promises a similar revolution in the retirement planning processes. Robo-advisors and mobile savings apps are a few harbingers of innovations to come. Nevertheless, these changes will bring with them new ethical and regulatory considerations, design challenges related to promoting adoption by an older population less trusting of technology, and concerns over data security and privacy. Our contributors take stock of the disruptive impact of financial technology on retirement planning, saving, investment, and decumulation; and it also highlights issues that regulators, plan sponsors, academics, and policymakers must consider as retirement practices evolve at a rapid pace.

Behavioral Finance, Decumulation, and the Regulatory Strategy for Robo-Advice

This chapter examines the regulatory and market structure concerns raised by automated financial advisors, and arrives at two conclusions. First, the principles-based regulatory approach of the 1940 Investment Advisors Act in the U.S. appears adequate and sufficiently flexible to address the new issues raised by automation, at least for now. Second, there is a pressing need to develop new mechanisms for encouraging investment robo-advisors (and financial advisors generally) to provide high quality decumulation services to their customers, because neither of the two prevailing compensation approaches—assets under management and commissions—provides sufficient incentive at present, and consumers are poorly equipped to evaluate the quality of decumulation services on their own.

Matching FinTech Advice to Participant Needs

The financial services industry is changing rapidly with the arrival of new economies of scale and networking effects attributable to FinTech, particularly via online or ‘robo’ advice. This chapter reviews the ‘robo-experience:’ how does it differ, if at all, from more traditional advice, and what is likely to happen next? After reviewing the goals and objectives of robo-advice, evolving advice models, who uses robo-advice, and investor behavior, we conclude that first adopters tend to be more affluent Millennial investors, as well as others seeking fast, mobile, and easy access to their finances. Nevertheless, though robo-advice has promised much, evidence is thin on the actual effects of using advice, such as changes in asset allocation and long-term effects on financial security.

FinTech Disruption

Technological advances have enabled enhancements in the financial services industry such as improved digital sales opportunities, enhanced communication with consumers, expanded accessibility of services, and improved tools for financial planning. These advances are democratizing services once available only to wealthy, extending older peoples’ ability to live independently, and improving their quality of life. This chapter presents a series of case studies explaining how the life insurance industry can use technology and new data to streamline the life insurance underwriting process and improve trust and transparency between insurers and customers. It also discusses how new content can enable on-demand education and simplify end of life planning, as well as the difficulties people face when saving for the types of purchases that can lead to credit card debt and challenge retirement savings. We also touch on the potential for wearable technology to improve wellness and manage chronic diseases.

Ethics, Insurance Pricing, Genetics, and Big Data

Insurers are rapidly gaining access to consumers’ genetic information. In the U.S., federal law bars using genetic information in health insurance, but not in life, disability, or long-term care insurance. Accordingly, insurers may fear adverse selection: individuals could undergo testing, learn they have risky genes, and purchase insurance without revealing test results. While other countries have established moratoria on insurers’ use of genetic information, there is no consensus in the U.S. regarding how to avoid ‘unfair discrimination.’ The chapter discusses alternative solutions, including government bans of insurers’ use of genetic information, or limiting insurer information to only high-risk genes.