Putnam Investments CEO Reynolds to Call for Sweeping Retirement Reform Agenda

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Putnam Investments announced today that its President and Chief Executive Officer Robert L. Reynolds will outline a sweeping retirement reform agenda in Washington, D.C. this afternoon before an audience of the nation’s 401(k) industry leaders, retirement plan sponsors and mutual fund executives. Reynolds will call on employers, plan providers, regulators, and Congress itself to act now to solve the nation’s retirement savings crisis, which was made more severe and urgent by the securities market declines of 2008.

Recognizing the declining role of traditional pension plans and Social Security, Reynolds, a 25-year retirement industry veteran who was recently named one of the most influential people in the defined-contribution retirement business*, will call for dramatic expansion and strengthening of 401(k)s and other defined-contribution savings plans to reliably deliver lifelong income to workers. Among the steps Reynolds will call for:

Oversight/Regulation

• Creating a new national insurance charter, a national insurance regulator, and a fund to back up lifetime income guarantees from insurers. The fund would be similar to that which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation maintains to protect bank deposits.
• Curbing the volatility of highly popular lifecycle funds by limiting the share of equity investments in the mature phase of lifecycle funds for people nearing retirement or in retirement. Some lifecycle funds, intended for those nearing or in retirement, had more than half of their assets in equity securities in 2008, Reynolds noted, worsening the impact of last year’s declines on those who needed to draw on their nest eggs for current income.
• Mandating that retirement plan advisors and providers make full, transparent disclosure of fees, risks, and responsibilities in plain English, without burdening participants with irrelevant details.
• Providing clear, strong legal protection to employers who offer advice and guidance and to those who include lifetime income guarantee products in their savings plans.

Plan Design

• Mandatingautomatic enrollment, savings escalation, and guidance to qualified default options for all employer-sponsored retirement savings plans.
• Requiring that workplace savings plans build in an option to secure a “retirement paycheck,” enabling any participant to choose an assured lifetime income option in the form of annuities or other insured, non-annuity income streams.
• Ensuring that all workplace savers have access to the advice and guidancethey need for asset allocation, retirement planning, and lifetime income strategies.
• Recognizing the growing importance of alternative risk-mitigating investment options and strategies (e.g., longevity insurance, absolute return).

Tax Incentives

• Extending tax credits to employers who voluntarily “match” worker savings contributions since these employers are helping to meet a national savings challenge. Workers’ own contributions are already tax-advantaged.
• Providing additional tax incentives to employees who invest in protected lifetime income products. Since converting life savings into lifelong income is even more challenging than accumulating a nest egg in the first place, the decision to give up some control of assets should be rewarded.

“If we draw the right lessons from the tough markets we’ve been passing through,” Reynolds said, “we can create a 21st century workplace savings system that will improve participants’ results, lower volatility, and reliably deliver a major share of income for life.”

Reynolds also called on policymakers and businesses to address the plight of the more than 75 million Americans, roughly half of the total workforce, who have no access to any workplace retirement plan. Even as the existing workplace savings system is upgraded, policymakers must find creative, cost-effective ways to enable small or struggling business to offer automatic, simple and low-cost savings options to their workers, according to Reynolds. The greatest beneficiaries of such extended workplace savings, he noted, would be younger, lower-income workers whose employers find the cost and complexity of establishing conventional defined-contribution plans too onerous.

“The multi-trillion dollar wave of wealth destruction that struck America’s markets in 2008 inflicted serious losses for retirement savings,” said Reynolds. “We need to act now to reboot the system and boost retirement savings substantially. If we don’t, millions of future retirees could face shortfalls in the income they need for everyday essentials such as food, medicine, and housing.

“The workplace is the best place to tackle America’s retirement challenge and develop a new generation of more robust, more resilient 401(k) plans that would provide millions of Americans with a reliable retirement paycheck,” he added.

Reynolds explained that the retirement crisis has its roots in several factors, including the impending retirement of 76 million baby boomers and the declining capacity of Social Security and traditional defined-benefit pensions and to replace the incomes that future retirees earned while on the job.

Introduced in the early 1980s, the first generation of 401(k) plans, which Reynolds called “Workplace Savings 1.0”, was enormously successful in spurring millions of workers to save trillions of dollars. By 2006, 62 million Americans (roughly half the workforce) had 401(k) plans, and had saved $4.2 trillion towards retirement in all defined contribution plans combined. By the turn of the 21st century, though, participation and savings rates hit a ceiling, because the purely voluntary, multi-choice design meant that workers had to “opt in” to participate and then make multiple investment choices from a wide array of options from which many were ill-prepared to choose.

The Pension Protection Act of 2006 introduced what Reynolds called “Workplace Savings 2.0.” This new model aimed to help retirement plans break through ceilings on participation, and savings rates by enhancing automatic enrollment of workers into 401(k) plans, escalating savings, and providing legal protection for employers offering lifecycle and balanced investment funds as “default” investment choices. But while the industry rapidly moved to adopt this much improved savings model, this fast-emerging second generation of 401(k) plans was sideswiped by the market shocks of 2008, which resulted in a one-year, 22 percent drop in 401(k) plan assets.

“Revamping the defined contribution plan system is too big a challenge for any single firm or sector of the financial industry,” said Reynolds. “The next generation of plan design and policy, which I call ‘Workplace Savings 3.0’, will require new alliances among mutual fund companies, plan sponsors, insurers, financial advisors and policymakers in Washington to build on the progress made through the Pension Protection Act.

“Together, we can continue evolving from a model that made it somewhat difficult to succeed to well structured plans that make it very, very hard to fail. I am absolutely convinced that the sorts of changes being proposed here, led by private innovation and backed by wise public policy, can create 21st-century workplace savings plans that provide a much more resilient, reliable foundation for America’s entire retirement system.”

NOTE: More information is available at www.theretirementsavingschallenge.com

About Putnam Investments

Founded in 1937, Putnam Investments is a leading global money management firm with over 70 years of investment experience. At the end of April 2009, Putnam had $99 billion in assets under management. Putnam has offices in Boston, London, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney. For more information, go to www.putnam.com.

For any Putnam fund, request a prospectus from your financial representative or by calling Putnam at 1-800-225-1581. The prospectus includes investment objectives, risks, fees, expenses, and other information that you should read and consider carefully before investing.

* 401(k)Wire.com, January, 2009.

Putnam mutual funds are distributed by Putnam Retail Management.

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Putnam Investments

Jon Goldstein, 617-760-1127

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Laura McNamara, 617-760-1108

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Constance Hubbell, 781-878-8882

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Source: Putnam Investments