Successful Defined Contribution Investment Design

Closing Comments

What’s measured improves.

—Peter F. Drucker

As I write these closing words, it’s been over 35 years since I started working in the finance industry and began saving toward retirement. I feel privileged to work in a profession that offers both intellectual challenge and social purpose. Over the past several decades, I have enjoyed working to improve retirement programs alongside plan sponsors, consultants, university professors, government leaders, lawyers, service providers, colleagues and other professionals. In contrast to many other investment areas, DC requires engagement across multiple disciplines and collaboration with other professional experts. It’s not just about investing: rather, to design successful DC plans, we must also understand benefits and insurance, behavioral science, communication approaches, regulatory and tax considerations, and administrative complexities. As no one of us can know it all, we look to each other in the DC professional community to work together in an effort to improve these critical retirement programs—to help workers succeed in meeting their retirement goals.

Over these three-plus decades since my financial services career began, DC plans have changed in many ways. They’ve evolved from being viewed as a supplemental, perhaps even insignificant, component of a retirement income strategy, to being the most-relied-upon private retirement savings program for workers worldwide . . . and thus significantly more serious. Along ...