Building custom simulators to communicate a large organization’s DC enhancements to its employees

The client is a major financial institution offering a closed defined benefit pension plan and an active defined contribution plan with matching benefits. The pension management team is enhancing the DC plan and they need to communicate the plan changes to both DB and DC members in an interactive and user-friendly way. This was meant to complement their internal communication material such as emails, webinars and FAQs.

Given the client’s very tight deadline to deliver the project, we had to build the solution as two stand-alone applications, one to compare DB with enhanced DC and another to show the impact of enhancements to the DC plan for members. As an initial step, we had to build a pension projection model for each plan based on fair actuarial and financial assumptions. This required very close collaboration with the client team to understand, test and vet the model output. Some of the challenges we faced:

• Highlight the changes at first sight while shielding the user from complexities of plan design features
• First daring attempt to compare the DB and DC plans side by side
• Adhering to legal requirements without compromising usability

We decided to package the solution as a journey to first familiarize the user with the overall plan and the implications of the plan change before taking them through the simulations. This provided an opportunity for just-in-time learning as we introduced a friendly and easy to understand version of the plan features.

The solution allows the user to simulate the key drivers of the benefit formula for basic comparison or to change the underlying assumptions for advanced comparison. Further, appropriate call to actions have been embedded to encourage users to take actions based on their recent learning/experience.