Prudential Retirement president recognized with Lillywhite Award

Christine Marcks, president of Prudential Retirement, has been named the 2015 winner of the Lillywhite Award, which honors people who have made contributions to Americans' economic security.

Ms. Marcks “has been an active party to improving the state of knowledge” of retirement planning and financial literacy, said Dallas Salisbury, president emeritus of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, Washington, which sponsors the award.

Ms. Marcks joined Prudential Retirement, Hartford, Conn., a unit of Prudential Financial Inc., in 2007. The award recognizes her entire career, which includes executive roles at ING Group — now Voya Financial — and Aetna Inc. as well as working as an international economist at the Treasury Department.

During her tenure, Prudential “has been an extra innovator in the nature of financial education efforts” both for participants and the general public, Mr. Salisbury said. Prudential “has helped people readily understand the impact of building savings over time.”

Some of that education has been in the form of television commercials describing the need for saving early, using approaches gleaned from consumer behavior research.

“The focal point of the ad campaign is to take complex financial topics and simplify them,” said Ms. Marcks. The ads have illustrated issues such as longevity risk and the impact of compounding.

For example, Prudential has run commercials based on a “Race for Retirement” event in November in Washington to illustrate peoples' retirement readiness.

One commercial encourages people to save an additional 1% more per year for retirement. Another follows people running through gates along a “Race For Retirement” course. One gate has a sign that asks, “Are you completely prepared for retirement?” but shows most racers running through the NO portal. At another gate whose sign asked runners if they can they give 1% more for retirement, most ran through the YES portal.

Another ad explored the “action gap,” asking younger people at what age they think they should start saving for retirement and asking older people when they actually started investing for retirement.

The gap — the younger people supported early saving; the older people showed they were saving late — was illustrated on a large wall comparing the results. “If we start saving a little more today,” the announcer in the ad explained, “we will be better prepared for tomorrow.”

Prudential has used the ads as education tools when its representatives meet with participants, said Ms. Marcks.

But Prudential also uses other strategies to deliver a message about saving for retirement early and often.

Ms. Marcks referenced one session in which Prudential representatives met with a client who was concerned participants in the plan weren't saving enough. “People don't think of their future self,” she said. “It's a stranger.”

So Prudential employed aging software to give participants a glimpse of their future selves, and the plan's participation rate went up, she said.

Mr. Salisbury also praised Ms. Marcks for Prudential's pioneering work in providing lifetime income statements to participants, enabling them to better understand how much money they will need — given their spending goals — in retirement.

Participants looking at an account balance might underestimate how much they need for a comfortable retirement, Ms. Marcks said. “When they see savings as an income stream, they see what they need,” she explained. When people read these statements, it “makes them behave differently than just seeing an account balance.”

Among her other accomplishments, Ms. Marcks has guided Prudential to prominent marketplace roles for retirement income solutions in defined contribution plans using a guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefit embedded within a plan's target-date portfolio and for derisking strategies for defined benefit plans. Derisking clients include General Motors Co., Detroit; Verizon Communications Inc., New York, and Motorola Solutions Inc., Schaumburg, Ill.

Ms. Marcks' role as an educator isn't confined to Prudential. Among her other roles, she is a member of the board of trustees of EBRI; a trustee of her alma matter, Assumption College in Worcester, Mass.; and a trustee of the Greater Hartford YMCA.

The Lillywhite Award is named for Ray Lillywhite, a pioneer in the pension investment field who spent more than 55 years in the industry. EBRI established the award in 1992 to honor long-term contributions in fields such as pension/retirement administration, investment management, consulting on investments or benefits and education research. n