Start-up’s new spin on annuities
Rather than pay a big lump sum, savers can apply smaller amounts via a subscription.
Matt Carey studied Arabic at the University of Pennsylvania, preparing for what he hoped would be a career at the Central Intelligence Agency. Eleven years later, he’s pitching annuity contracts.
He’s actually happy about that.
A summer job at the State Department persuaded him that government service wasn’t as exciting as he first thought. So he headed to Wall Street.
A stint at the advisory firm Lazard Ltd. piqued his interest in a growing threat to the national welfare that didn’t involve espionage — retirement security. Or, more precisely, the lack of it across the U.S.
Carey’s elevator pitch for a company now called Blueprint Income? “We are building the first digital retirement plan that guarantees you won’t run out of money as long as you live.”
He and two co-founders are building a way for consumers to more easily buy what has notoriously been a hard sell: annuity contracts, both those that create an immediate income stream and others that produce income years down the road.
The idea was inspired in part by the research of Olivia Mitchell, a professor and retirement security expert at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
One of Blueprint’s innovations involves how deferred-income annuities are sold. They typically require five- or six-digit sums in return for a future stream. Carey’s website spits out a quote for a contract in 60 seconds and requires an initial investment of $5,000.
The real twist is part of a trend that has swept industries from mattresses to clothing to movies: subscription-based business models. After the initial investment, buyers can increase their retirement income stream with deposits of as little as $100 a month to create what Blueprint calls “a personal pension.”
Mark Iwry, a key architect of retirement policy in the Obama administration, recalled that while the two worked together at the Treasury Department, Carey was “intrigued by how that key feature of the declining defined-benefit pension plan — a stream of retirement income guaranteed to last a lifetime — could be provided by the market more simply, more cheaply and in a way that’s easier for ordinary people to access and buy.”
New York Life Insurance Co. and Guardian Life Insurance Co. are Blueprint’s current partners in the subscription service. New Yorkbased Blueprint, which acts as a fiduciary, gets a onetime commission of 1% to 4% of the initial investment when it sells immediate, deferred and qualified-longevity annuity contracts, or QLACs. (A QLAC is an annuity funded by money from a qualified retirement plan or an IRA.) For the subscription product, the commission is split into two payments over two years.
Blueprint just announced seed funding of $2.75 million from a group including Green Visor Capital, where former Visa Chief Executive Joseph Saunders is a general partner, and NextView Ventures, where Lee Hower, an early PayPal employee and member of the founding team at LinkedIn, is a partner. The board of advisors includes Iwry, who isn’t an investor, and Jean Chatzky, personal finance editor of the “Today” show, who has invested.
“The insurance industry is far slower to adapt to newer technologies” than other parts of the financial services industry, said Michael Walsh, a general partner at Green Visor Capital. “And within insurance, annuities are by far the slowest.”
Making it a subscription accomplishes the once-impossible feat of explaining annuities to the average American.
“If you break down retirement savings into a way where it’s almost like a subscription for your future, it’s a lot easier to think about what it means,” Walsh said. “For every dollar you put in, you know how much more you will have on a monthly basis when you retire.”
Blueprint’s initial challenge as a business, though, is to show that consumers will buy annuities directly — by subscription. About four years into its existence, the start-up has placed $10 million to $30 million of insurance premiums across hundreds of consumers, according to Carey.
The subscription product became available in beta form late last year, drawing customers ages 32 to 70.
Blueprint’s larger goal is to get into 401(k) plans and have employers make some, or all, of their matching contributions into annuities. That would create a product similar to a defined-benefit plan, lessening the dilemma of how to invest a lump sum from a 401(k).
For now, Carey has no illusions about the challenge Americans face in deciding how to invest their savings so they won’t die poor.
“In a world where employer pensions don’t exist, you need something that does the same thing,” Carey said. Otherwise, “retirement is going to become a luxury good.”