Engagement Tool Walkthrough: Retirement Adequacy

Mar 16, 2014 Engagement Tool Walkthrough: Retirement Adequacy

In our last post we discussed the importance of real online engagement; that is, being able to genuinely engage and interact with your clients in an online environment. And we don’t mean offering simple, non-interactive financial calculators! In fact quite the opposite: Provisio’s web education & engagement tools are designed to take your advice service to the next level in terms of connecting with your website visitors.

Without further ado, let’s go ahead and take a walkthrough of one of those engagement solutions: the Retirement Adequacy tool. As a quick reminder, the Retirement Adequacy platform is used to assist people in determining how long their superannuation will last and what steps they need to take in order to align financial decisions with lifestyle objectives.

Step One: Personal Details

After launching the Retirement Adequacy web engagement tool, your site visitor will be presented with an interface consisting of a series of simple questions. The tool starts with some basic client questions as shown below:

When done, click Next.

Step Two: Salary & Super Account Balances

In this step website visitors are asked about their employment income and super account balance. Optionally, users can also provide information about non-employment income and other super account balances.

See the little blue gear icons

adjacent to the fields? Clicking on them enables you to provide more information, such as frequency and type. For example, clicking the gear icon for the Income from employment field gives you the option to modify the frequency of your pay period, specify whether the income is quoted before or after tax, indicate inclusion or exclusion of super and enter an employer contribution percentage:

When done, click Next.

Step Three: Super Contributions

This step asks if the user is currently making extra super contributions; if yes, they are prompted to specify the before and after tax contribution amount.

Note: Click the blue gear icon to indicate how often you contribute.

When done, click Next.

Step Four: Retirement Objectives

In this step your client is asked about their retirement goals in terms of a retirement age and a desired income. The web engagement tool, powered by the Provisio optimisation engine, uses this data to determine how the client’s goals can be reached.

When done, click Next.

Step Five: Government Age Pension

The final step, shown below, is shown if the tool determines that your client may be eligible for Centrelink payments. If so, they are prompted to provide further details regarding their assets and income. These are used to calculate their specific Centrelink entitlement.

When done, click OK. If a client wishes to skip this step, they can simply click Cancel.

Viewing the Results

After clicking OK, the Provisio engine processes all information in order to present an optimised snapshot of the client’s retirement years and expected income.

Key information includes:

Summary Finding: This is the grey box at the top of the Results screen. In the example below, “Assuming you retire at 65 we estimate that you may be able to live off $40,000 per year until 5 years after your statistical life expectancy.”
Income in Retirement: This is the amount of income that the client can expect to receive in retirement. The calculated amount provides the maximum drawdown of the pension balance to support your client until their statistical life expectancy.
Age Super is Depleted: The expected age is the age at which your client’s super will run out if they draw the recommended retirement income Provisio has calculated. If the client specifies an alternative retirement income, the target age indicates when the super will run out if that level of income is provided.

Call to Action

The Contact button on the bottom-right corner of the Results screen acts as a bridge between the web engagement tool and the Provisio adviser software. As soon as the Contact button is clicked, an e-mail notification is automatically sent to you with a link. Clicking this link opens the Provisio adviser software with all of the strategy information collected from your online website visitor!

You can then proceed to modify the strategy, as needed, and produce an SoA for your client.

Exploring Functionality

There is a good deal of functionality here that enables your website users to explore their unique financial scenario on their own time, whether it’s retirement adequacy as above or via one of our other engagement tools (Transition to Retirement, Contributions Optimiser, and Insurance Analysis).

In our next blog post we’ll have a deeper look at this functionality, so please stay tuned.

Until the next time!

When not writing content for Provisio, Brian likes cooking, gardening and playing games with his young daughter. He works remotely from the Philippines.