Enabling Financial Wellness and Security
Enabling financial wellness and security is a key goal for AIG Life & Retirement and the clients we serve. AIG’s Group Retirement business offers various products, resources and information to assist our clients with their own financial planning. These include:
- Financial professionals who guide retirement plan participants on financial wellness, longevity planning and retirement readiness.
- A financial literacy and education curriculum that includes live and on-demand webinars and in-person workshops.
- FutureFIT University, an interactive resource powered by EVERFI, which enables customers to build tailored financial literacy content.
- Financial planning calculators and other online tools and resources. AIG Retirement Services was named among the Top 10 firms for participant satisfaction with websites and online capabilities in a 2021 study by Cogent Syndicated.
- National education campaigns and engagement programs that reach tens of thousands of clients to help drive savings, education and action. For example, during the 2021 America Saves Week, 27% of engaged retirement plan participants enrolled, completed registration or increased their plan contributions.
In 2021, we enhanced our offering to make it easier for clients to understand their retirement options and plan for a more secure financial future. For example, we simplified the user interface of our online retirement management platform, improved the mobile experience and added security features and information resources. For employers, we developed a retirement plan health dashboard that enables retirement plan sponsors to track the progress and impact that their organization’s retirement plan is having on their employees’ financial planning.
AIG’s Individual Retirement business is committed to enhancing financial literacy through client education. Our education programs seek to simplify complex financial planning concepts, such as retirement income planning and Social Security planning, to help Americans better prepare for more secure financial futures.
In 2021, our Social Security Savvy program garnered two MarCom Gold Awards, and our Income Savvy® program garnered a MarCom Gold Award and a MarCom Platinum Award from the Association of Marketing and Communications Professionals. Further, our Financial Know How for Women program, which was specifically designed to help address the financial planning concerns many women face when preparing for retirement, received a MarCom Gold Award. Individual Retirement also received the DALBAR award for Customer Experience Excellence for the third year in a row, underscoring its consistent commitment to providing a superior standard of care.
As part of our commitment to promoting financial security and resilience more broadly, we also partner with the Foundation for Financial Planning to provide pro bono financial planning to at-risk Americans, e.g., cancer patients, military veterans, victims of natural disasters, domestic violence survivors, financially vulnerable seniors and frontline healthcare workers.
With fewer people covered by traditional pension plans, annuities can fill a gap in retirement portfolios by providing protected lifetime income for as long as a person lives, no matter how the markets perform. AIG Life & Retirement offers a broad range of annuity products and solutions to help address specific client needs, goals and risk tolerance levels. We also support our diversified network of distribution partners with innovative tools and resources, including Client Connections from AIG®, a one-stop digital resource for enhancing their connections with clients.
AIG Life & Retirement is a founding board member of the Alliance for Lifetime Income, a nonprofit educational organization that creates awareness and educates Americans about the value and importance of annuities and protected lifetime income in retirement. As part of its Protected Lifetime Income Study, the Alliance for Lifetime Income found that the number of protected households—i.e., those with an annuity or pension to supplement what they will receive from Social Security—had increased three percentage points to 40%. This represents over three million new protected households. The study attributed the rise to the increase in annuity ownership.
By 2030, one in every five U.S. residents will be retirement age (65+). With an aging population comes an increasing need to manage longevity risk—the healthcare, long-term care and lifetime financial planning challenges that come with advanced age. In the U.S., AIG L&R offers life insurance products with accelerated death benefits that can be used to cover financial needs during policyholders’ later retirement years. AIG Life & Retirement also offers chronic, critical and terminal illness benefits that allow policyowners to tap into their death benefits to pay for certain covered medical costs or long-term care expenses.
To help prevent elder financial abuse, AIG Life & Retirement formed the Elder and Vulnerable Client Care Unit, which raises awareness around elder financial exploitation and trains our employees to identify suspected cases of financial abuse. The need is clear: since its creation in 2016, the group has reviewed thousands of potential elder financial abuse cases, with the number of such cases increasing by about 30% per year.
To help reduce the long-term impact that student loan debt can have on financial wellness, AIG Group Retirement works with Savi, a social impact technology firm, to provide individuals working in the nonprofit and public service sectors with an online tool to help navigate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. At the end of 2021, the tool had more than 7,000 registered accounts managing over $100 million in total debt, with $40 million in projected forgiveness.