“Simple isn’t about reducing sophistication,” Meloche says. “Throughout 2024 and a big part of 2025, I met with clients. plan sponsors, prospects of ours, advisors, large consulting firms. I wanted to better understand needs and preferences. I was feeling things were evolving. And consistently in all these meetings I’ve heard clients or consultant and advisors say clients are looking for quality portfolios that deliver strong risk-adjusted returns.”
Applying institutional outcomes to retail
The outcome, Meloche says, is the lifetime financial security of plan members. Simplicity in communication is meant to help achieve that outcome by freeing plan sponsors to focus on planning for members and individual outcomes. As solutions become more complex, it can be more challenging for plan members to fully grasp how they work. That struggle in understanding can distract from a more important focus on outcomes. By simplifying how strategies like target date funds are understood, there’s more time and mental capacity to focus on planning for decumulation and ensuring retirees don’t outlive their savings.
Sal Ammirato, Vice-President, Head of Retail Distribution & Channel Strategy, Sun Life Global Investments, is seeing a growing appetite for these kind of structured plans and solutions on the retail market today. He emphasized how the different forms of risk innate in modern asset management have shifted what advisors and their clients want from larger asset managers.
“One of the biggest challenges facing retirees today is balancing longevity risk, market risk, and inflation risk. Institutional investors have long used outcome-oriented solutions to manage similar challenges, and many of those concepts translate well to individual investors,” Ammirato says. “Structured products can help provide a more defined investment experience by offering varying levels of downside protection while maintaining some participation in market growth. For retirees, this can create greater confidence in remaining invested and reduce the emotional impact of market volatility during the decumulation phase.”
Controlling for behavioural risk
Structured products, Ammirato says, are becoming more common among retail advisors and their clients as a portfolio construction tool. Behavioural outcome and behavioural investing matter so much to retail advisors, and Ammirato believes structured products can help with that. Just as Meloche applies these straightforward, outcome-based wrappers to a DC plan member audience, Ammirato argues that retail investors can rely on structured products for stability and reassurance amid market volatility.
