Recordkeeper Corner: Building the recordkeeper of the future

A conversation between Darren Zino, Vice President, Managing Director, Head of US Retirement Sales at Transamerica and Brendan McCarthy, Head of Retirement Investing, Nuveen

Recordkeepers play a pivotal role as the conversation around guaranteed lifetime income continues to grow in importance. Yet with competing demands, from enhancing client technology platforms and adapting to regulatory change to onboarding new products onto platforms, teams are constantly balancing priorities with limited resources. To explore how recordkeepers are navigating these challenges, to discuss our recently launched partnership with Transamerica, and to hear how he's built his team, we sat down with one of the leaders at Transamerica, Darren Zino.

Key takeaways

1. Culture and relationships are Transamerica’s differentiators.
2. Successful adoption of lifetime income solutions requires more than just platform integration.
3. Recordkeepers and advisors must go all-in on education and advocacy.

McCarthy: You’ve built real momentum by emphasizing the value of the individual, even compared to firms with greater resources. To me this is what makes Transamerica punch above its weight. How do you view your role, and what has driven your success?

Zino: One of the things that makes us special is our size. We’re big enough to have institutional capabilities while still being nimble and personalized. Our team structure also allows us to lead with strong relationships. Anyone can put together good products and systems, but to succeed you also need great people. That’s part of the secret sauce at Transamerica: we attract people and partners and customers who all lean into each other.

My top priority is managing the culture we’ve built. As I’ve moved up in leadership positions, I’ve come to realize that while I may speak with the same voice, that voice carries more weight now. I have to be aware of that and do my best to cultivate the culture we want.

At some recordkeepers, the machine has become bigger than the people, but as long as I’m here, people will be driving this engine forward. Of course, we still need to constantly evolve our infrastructure and technology. But we also need to keep adding arrows to the quiver and exploring new opportunities to serve clients better.

McCarthy: We recently announced our partnership with Transamerica, and for us this is a really exciting time. What do you look for when partnering with firms looking to develop and get lifetime income solutions on your platform?

Zino: When we looked at the partnership with Nuveen to bring lifetime income solutions to our clients, we knew we didn’t want to build 15 versions of the same solution. We believe in going deep with a few select partners rather than offering multiple products with overlapping features. And a big part of our decision was the strength of your firm. You’ve built the infrastructure, you’ve done the research and you know how to train and educate the field. We didn’t want a rookie partner.

Guaranteed income is still a new concept for many people. There are two elements to it — first is the obvious product development — but just as critical is crafting a story around why this should be a foundational part of retirement planning.

We need to think about how we are going to communicate effectively to both plan sponsors and participants. Setting the product up on the platform is the relatively easy part. The challenge is ensuring that people understand its importance. We’ve gotten so caught up in defining retirement readiness by account balances alone. We need to shift the conversation to focus on how people will turn that balance into a retirement income stream they can count on, and we need to break that down into simple, relatable terms.

McCarthy: Education has been a big focus for us too, especially helping plan sponsors and advisors better understand the available solutions. In your view, what’s the role of the recordkeeper in this education process?

Zino: We can’t just dip our toe in the water. Lifetime income can’t be an afterthought for our teams. Every time we gather as a team, we talk about it. We have to think of the right way to get our 150 people thinking about these lifetime income solutions and communicating their value every day. It’s not enough to just stick it on the platform, we need to embrace it. We are going to do that by integrating lifetime income solutions into our partner conversations, to help educate them about the value and impact that these solutions can bring to the plan and its participants.

McCarthy: How do you think advisors should be approaching lifetime income?

Zino: I think many retirement plan advisors are already leaning into this conversation. They’re bringing it up with plan sponsors who truly care about their employees’ outcomes. If you’re an advisor and you’re not talking about lifetime income, you’re at a disadvantage. If another advisor is, and you’re not, you may not even get the chance to explain why. It’s important for advisors to integrate this into their story, and that means developing real knowledge about how these solutions work. Advisors have to be on the offensive with lifetime income and make it part of their practice.

One of the things we like about the Nuveen program is the simplicity and the fact that you know annuities. Many plan advisors have never sold an annuity; they didn't come from a wealth advisory background. So, we really have to connect the dots, to establish that this is not the annuity that carries a lot of baggage in the retail space. These integrated annuities are different: they act and look like a target date solution, but have the built in guaranteed income component.

We need to make sure that we expand this beyond the echo chamber of NAPA events where we’re seeing the same group of advisors appear on stage. We need to get this messaging out there to the 44,000 advisors who don’t know the story. And what better way to do that than to unleash our 150 people in distribution? The more we share the story, the more it resonates, and the more comfortable people become.