Starbucks Over Saving Bucks for Retirement?
It became national news in America when a survey found that millennials value their Starbucks more than saving bucks for retirement:
“More than 45% of 18 to 23-year-olds have spent more on coffee than investing in their retirement, and 35% of 24 to 35-year-olds have done the same, according to a survey from micro-investing app Acorns, an app which links credit cards to the app and invests spare change,” according to an article in USA Today.
Many financial experts used the opportunity presented by the promotion of this survey to explain to millennials how and why they should begin saving more for r
etirement. But what about recordkeepers? Surely the continuation of this trend doesn’t bode well for their future. How can they encourage increased investment among millennials (and really among all segments)?
Give greater control to the business – as highlighted in Sapiens’ eBook, Winning Over Y, millennials demand a user-friendly and intuitive experience. But many retirement platforms were designed by IT departments, with minimal input from the business. Making matters worse, some of the legacy defined contribution platforms were designed by IT departments decades ago, and are still bound by the technology restraints of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.
To empower their business side, recordkeepers require a solution that drills-down to the lowest granularity of rules and supports the autonomous creation and adjustment of the full range of plans, using a truly configuration-based approach, without coding.
Reduce the cost of regulatory adaptation – defined contribution providers have too often been forced to engage in regulatory compliance projects that, when translated into IT projects, end up costing millions of dollars. This is money that could be spent on truly modernizing systems and processes in a way that would help the core business and improve the customer experience.
One way to expedite these regulatory compliance projects and reduce costs is to implement a cohesive, tightly integrated and agile governance model: centralization and seamless integration capabilities produce a coherent and well-controlled process implementation across business operations.
Onboard quickly and easily – we are living in an “I want it now!” culture. Millennials expect to click a button and receive personalized service. But unwieldy retirement procedures, such as customer onboarding, plan migration, retroactive processing, fee management and disclosure, financial adjustments impact analysis, etc., require a great deal of time, effort and cost from recordkeepers.
The ways to speed these procedures are advanced process automation, straight-though processing and subsequent pro-active management of customers.
Focus on your customers – millennials crave personalization and tailored plans. A single, enterprise-wide core recordkeeping platform that ensures data consistency across all systems and interfaces can enable limitless plan configurations, to meet customers’ expectations and achieve higher customer satisfaction. Even demanding millennials.
By following these tips, you’ll hopefully make it easier for the average Joe to put down his cup of Joe and sign up for a plan.
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Yaffa Cohen-Ifrah Yaffa Cohen-Ifrah is Sapiens Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Investor Relations. She is responsible for formulating Sapiens’ global marketing efforts, including marketing strategy, demand generation, branding, and communications. She is also responsible for all aspects of investor relations. Most recently, Yaffa was Vitech Systems Group’s CMO. Before that, she was the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Corporate Communications of Sapiens. Previously, she held several other senior positions at large global companies, including Strauss Group, ADAMA, Victoria’s Secret, and Saks Fifth Avenue.