Building a retirement income solution requires flexible technologies to achieve scale across the defined contribution ecosystem.

In our previous blog post, we explored the importance of teamwork and collaboration between stakeholders who operate retirement income products. In this installment of our Implementation Playbook series, we focus on something integral to the scalability of retirement income: The Product Stack. The Product Stack is the aggregation of the different components required to build retirement income products, with each integration being unique to the product and the operation methodology for a given distribution.

To Move Forward, We Have to Look Back

To best understand Micruity’s concept of the Product Stack, we must look to the past and how business applications, across many business domains, utilized a traditional model of software application building that was more akin to a monolithic architecture, built as self-contained and independent from other applications.

A monolithic architecture used to be a common software design approach that encompassed a full business workflow in a single application. While this design approach may have been common in the past, it has limitations in that the larger the application gets, the more complicated maintenance becomes when making subtle changes to the code, making updates restrictive, time-consuming, and costly.

These were some key considerations for Micruity in designing our architecture from the ground up utilizing a modern design perspective with a microservices infrastructure to support our clients with the optimal platform to scale and distribute retirement income solutions.

Dynamic in Nature (Technical Section)

A microservices architecture provides the benefit of a flexible approach that can support any number of possible and likely retirement income product configurations.

When looking at a sample product’s systems-architecture diagram, it might fit nicely on a page, but the reality is that when working with real organizations trying to stand up real retirement income solutions, implementations will each have unique attributes and interconnectivity needs. To most effectively support all scenarios, product manufacturers will require technology that can be adapted to real-world configuration paths.

One important quality of a Product Stack built with a microservices mindset is that it can be more efficient from a development perspective because each component has an independent code base. The independent components help make the business logic and complexity visible and more manageable by separating tasks into smaller processes that function independently of each other and contribute to the overall whole.

Some of the advantages of having these independent components from a software development and support perspective include faster development cycles, the ability to scale individual components, improved reliability where errors and bug tracking can be isolated and won’t affect the entire application’s availability, and greater flexibility when optimizing each of the individual components where deployment can be faster, without the need to redeploy the entire system-wide application.

Growth-Oriented Design

When the rubber meets the road, a micro-service infrastructure is essential to asset managers, insurers, and other product manufacturers looking to scale their market footprint effectively and have a broader adoption base across many plan sponsors and recordkeeper platforms. A Product Stack must be thought of with flexibility, scalability, and ease of integration to support growth within reasonable timetables. Building with a firm like Micruity can provide the infrastructure for the Product Stack with the flexibility to support a range of configuration scenarios across recordkeeper platforms, which is likely the most effective adoption approach.

Maximized Utility by Paying for Functionality Used

One other important benefit of Micruity’s Product Stack with modern microservices is a more efficient and economical approach in which product manufacturers and platforms only pay for those services and capabilities that are being used rather than spending more for a monolithic application and only using a subset of functionality.

Micruity’s envisioned Product Stack layers are designed to be utilized in any specific combination required for the given configuration. There may be scenarios where the product requires utilizing a single vendor for the complete Product Stack. Still, more often than not, multiple vendors will support the different layers of the Product Stack. For example, the recordkeeper may provide the user experience, the insurer may provide the benefit calculation, and Micruity will be responsible for all data sharing, tracking, and storage.

Product Stack Case Study

Micruity’s illustrative case study in our Product Stack Whitepaper highlights the common implementation scenario for a life insurer looking to scale their product across several recordkeeper platforms without incurring a massive technology and maintenance spend.

It is the forward-looking design approach that enables this flexibility and scale across the spectrum of retirement income solutions.