Product & Service Launches

Franklin Templeton Adds Tax-Aware Long-Short Strategies to Indexing Platform

Franklin Resources Inc., which operates as Franklin Templeton, announced Tuesday the addition of tax-aware long-short strategies to its Canvas indexing platform.

Beginning with a U.S. large-cap 130/30 structure, the suite of strategies will expand to include additional leverage options.

According to the announcement, by combining long and short positions with the use of leverage, tax-aware long-short strategies can increase the potential to generate excess investment returns while enhancing tax benefits through increased loss-harvesting potential, compared to a long-only direct index. The strategies can help investors diversify concentrated stock positions, prepare for liquidity events and unlock portfolios constrained by tax lock.

Mutual of America Teams Up with 3 Firms to Launch Managed IRA

Mutual of America Financial Group released its MoA Managed IRA product, created in collaboration with Morningstar Retirement, IRALogix and Envestnet.

The product delivers personalized portfolio recommendations and advice to account holders through the Morningstar Retirement Manager platform. Aside from considering an individual’s age, the individual retirement account builds investment and savings strategies based on the individual’s income, risk tolerance, retirement timeline and contribution behavior. Portfolio can also be managed on a discretionary basis by a professional investment adviser.

AAII and BetterInvesting Partner to Educate Investors

The American Association of Individual Investors and BetterInvesting, two nonprofit organizations that combine to represent the largest block of American individual investors of any nonprofit, launched a partnership to educate individual investors.

BI will leverage its stock-investing methodology, and AAII will provide its research, analysis and investment discovery tools as part of the collaboration. The two groups will provide joint presentations, content exchanges, educational emails, social media exposure and “members-only” offers for web investing tools, newsletters and other resources.

“Together, our organizations aim to rise above the noise that permeates Wall Street and emphasize the importance of having a clearly defined plan—and the confidence to stick with it,” said John Bajkowski, AAII’s president, in a statement. “We’re committed to ensuring that all investors have access to data-driven strategies and tools to make sound investing decisions.”

Congruent Solutions Launches IRA Recordkeeping Platform

Congruent Solutions launched CORE IRA, a recordkeeping platform accessed through an application programming interface.

The release is intended to handle the processing of force-out individual retirement accounts. According to the announcement, the company plans to expand the platform to process voluntary, rollover, SIMPLE and SEP IRAs.

CORE IRA currently provides:

• Automated processing for distributions, ACH, Roth conversions and death distributions;
• Compliance safeguards for required minimum distributions, Secure 2.0 Act of 2022 requirements and the LexisNexis-powered address-verification service; and
• Cloud-native, SOC 2-compliant architecture.