As I was taking my weekly spin around the brokerage websites that Corporate Insight covers, I noticed a common theme — retirement. Firms are once again pushing “easy” retirement planning solutions and have rolled out a number of promotions that speak to this issue. While the idea of simplifying the retirement planning process is not new to the industry, firms are revisiting this concept and have introduced several new products and services to support it. 

Fidelity’s homepage currently features a banner advertisement that reads, “Retirement income now made easier.” The ad highlights the firm’s new Income Replacement Funds and Growth & Guaranteed Income Annuity, which both help investors approaching, or living in, retirement manage their cash flow.

TD Ameritrade added a similar image to their roster of rotating homepage promotions. The image displays the following question and answer – “Retirement Planning Getting Complicated? Simplify Your Game Plan.” This links to information about their professionally allocated TDAX Independence ETFs. The funds are tailored to each investor’s target retirement date and automatically adjust to preserve capital.

Not to be outdone, E*TRADE Financial has also focused on retirement planning the past few months. The retirement portion of their website currently sports the tag line “Retirement investing made easy and affordable” and promotes their new Retirement QuickPlan tool. This publicly available resource provides a quick assessment of a user’s retirement savings and investing plan and offers tips on how to achieve certain goals. 

While the products and services being marketed are clearly different in the way they go about aiding the retirement planning process (an annuity versus an interactive tool for example), the message used to promote them is the same. Firms want to help investors plan and save for life after nine to five, and use words like “easy” and “simple” in their marketing campaigns to draw them in.

We’ll continue to monitor this development to see if any other brokerages launch retirement-oriented products or services and also pay close attention to how they communicate the benefits of these resources.