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Income Lab Debuts Retirement Stress Test Tool

Denver-based retirement management software provider Income Lab debuted its Retirement Stress Test tool on Tuesday.

The new offering is designed to show financial advisors how their clients might use spending adjustments to navigate difficulties, including market volatility or high inflation, according to the company.

Related: RPA Edge: Jim Smith on How the Retirement Income Industry is Evolving

The tool includes the option to run plans through real-life historical scenarios, including the Great Depression of the 1930s, the post-war period, 1970s stagflation, the 1990s dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis.

In addition to showing how income adjustments would help keep plans on track during these headwinds, advisors are also able to compare different strategies simultaneously.

Related: Lifetime Income Products Get A Boost

Chief Innovation Officer Justin Fitzpatrick and CEO Johnny Poulsen co-founded Income Lab in 2018. The firm introduced a beta version of its cloud-based software in early 2020 for the financial advisory and planning market.

In September 2021, Income Lab completed a seed financing round, raising $1.7 million from industry executives and investors. Investors included Dave Agostine, a former managing director for BlackRock and former CEO of Cachematrix; Tom Florence, a managing director at Hamilton Lane and former CEO of 361 Capital; and Robert Pinkerton, CFO at Conga and an Income Lab board member. Agostine and Florence serve on Income Lab's advisory board, in addition to Derek Tharp, a financial planner at Conscious Capital, lead researcher for financial blog Kitces.com and assistant professor of finance at the University of Southern Maine. 

In June 2022, Income Lab introduced Life Hub, an interactive tool for financial advisors that gives clients a detailed visualization of their financial lives on one page, at any level of detail and at any point in time. Life Hub is included as part of the Income Lab retirement planning software available to advisors at rates ranging from $159 per month for a single advisor to $139 per month for large teams of advisors, according to the company.

Income Lab is one of several such providers to tackle the retirement income problem. IncomeConductor is being used mostly by planners and registered investment advisors, while IncomeDiscovery has pursued larger players, including financial institutions and independent broker/dealers. Another, Income Solver, is a decumulation strategy overlay application.

William Trout, director of wealth management at Javelin Strategy & Research, said investor longevity and a volatile market environment make retirement income planning “more important than ever.”

“Instruments like Income Lab’s Retirement Stress Test tool help advisors guide clients through periods of economic upheaval and demonstrate in clear-cut terms the importance of keeping a steady hand at the wheel,” said Trout. “At the same time, delivery of a forward-looking perspective helps instill confidence in clients, who are able to tie their spending habits to outcomes. Skeptical millennial investors, who may be just now starting to think about their retirement years, may be the first to be won over.”

Wally Okby, strategic advisor for wealth management for the Aite-Novarica Group, said there was a “good reason” that several vendors already offer sophisticated personal financial management and financial wellness tools to the wealth community. Several analyses recently completed by the firm showed “holistic practices breed healthier and stickier client relationship,” said Okby. These results illustrated that between 50% and 60% of smaller wealth practices with less than $1 billion in assets under management deliver cash flow management to their clients.

“The most holistic financial advisors tend to win more new client relationships, total client assets, fee-based assets, client wallet share and revenue than those who are not. The vendor community is now clearly poised to capitalize on this demand for holistic planning,” said Okby. “The smaller the practice, the less likely it is that this service is offered. I imagine that as the larger market participants look to grow and consolidate their positions among large practices, the team at Income Lab will look to quickly scale their business through signing up large numbers of smaller practices.”

UW takes over management of carbon capture test center

The University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources is taking over management of the state’s leading carbon capture test site.

The School of Energy Resources is assuming control of the Wyoming Integrated Test Center at Basin Electric Power Cooperative’s Dry Fork Station coal plant in Gillette, taking the reins from the Wyoming Energy Authority which has managed the carbon capture test site that first opened in 2018.

Friday’s announcement by the university comes weeks after researchers and industry leaders broke ground on two projects to study carbon technologies that could soon extend the viability of coal or natural gas power plants amid market and environmental pressures.

The change is largely administrative and will have little impact on day-to-day operations, said Jason Begger, the center’s director. But the School of Energy Resources brings with it resources beyond the four-member Wyoming Energy Authority. The School of Energy Resources itself has been closely involved with the development of the facility as well as an early player in carbon capture research.

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“What I think it does show is just sort of the evolution and the growth of that facility,” Begger said.

Since the center’s inception back in 2014 under then-Gov. Matt Mead, the research site has transformed into one of the few facilities worldwide where carbon capture innovators can test their ideas at a commercial scale. Just last year, the center was recognized internationally becoming the 15th carbon capture research facility inducted into the International Test Center Network. “It really became more of an operational issue. Now we’ve got a facility, it’s up and running, and now we just need to operate it [and] think to the future,” Begger said.

As the leader of the public-private partnership, the School of Energy Resources will bring with it an ongoing relationship with the U.S. Department of Energy. The school already administers and oversees a number of Department of Energy grants, a relationship that could benefit the test site down the road as the federal government looks to invest more in carbon capture technology.

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“We’re looking at more and more funding opportunities coming out of DOE,” Begger said. “An area of opportunity is trying to see if we can obtain some of that money to upgrade the facility, add more testing infrastructure, more amenities, those types of things to be more attractive to a wider array of carbon capture technologies.”

Researchers currently rely on coal-based flue gas from the Dry Fork Station to test their concepts, but the consistency of coal flue gas is different than other power sources, such as natural gas, Begger said. With money from the Department of Energy, the center could build out the test site so it could replicate other carbon dioxide emitting sources, appealing to companies as a single site for all of their research.

The test center under the School of Energy Resources will look to build on a string of recent successes. The test site hosted five teams of researchers competing for the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, which asked companies to capture and convert carbon dioxide into other products. One of two winners, UCLA CarbonBuilt, used the center to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete by injecting captured CO2 into the cement mixture.

Then early last month, Japanese manufacturer Kawasaki Heavy Industries and California-based Membrane Technology and Research broke ground on the first major carbon capture projects at the center after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted years of planning and investment.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries will test a new type of carbon-absorbing compound, while Membrane Technology and Research will study membranes that pull carbon dioxide from the flue gas of Dry Fork Station. For Membrane Technology and Research, the research marks the last step before their technology would begin commercial production.

“SER has been honored to collaborate with ITC stakeholders since its inception, and we look forward to continuing those relationships as we move to a management role for the facility,” Holly Krutka, the executive director of the School of Energy Resources, said in a statement. “The ITC is an important component of Wyoming’s overall approach to carbon management and is a success story that supports development of new technologies aimed at driving down costs for carbon capture.”

Gov. Mark Gordon also applauded the management change. Gordon and other Wyoming leaders have touted carbon capture as a solution for the state’s slumping coal industry as it aims to compete with increasingly affordable energy sources with lower emissions. In a press release, Gordon again praised the test center and the new funding opportunities the School of Energy will bring.

“Under the guidance of SER, the ITC will show Wyoming is serious about practical and workable carbon-management solutions that reduce CO2 emissions while simultaneously promoting responsible, reliable and affordable energy from fossil fuels,” he said.

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