SunTrust buys into a retirement-income tech maker

FWR Staff

29 December 2008

Start-up LifeYield gets double nod from the bank's private-wealth division. SunTrust Banks plans to make LifeYield technology available to its financial advisors. LifeYield's Retirement Optimized Income (ROI) helps advisors manage their clients' assets across household portfolios of taxable and tax-qualified accounts with a view to generating retirement income.

"We view LifeYield's technology solution as a game-changing breakthrough in the retirement-income distribution aspect of the comprehensive planning and overlay services we offer and it enables our advisors in helping our clients achieve their retirement objectives," says Mark Peters, head of SunTrust's Private Wealth Management unit. "SunTrust is committed to being an industry leader in providing comprehensive retirement solutions."

Equity stake

Atlanta-based SunTrust is so committed, in fact, that it's buying a stake in LifeYield.

"Even given the tumultuous economic times, they are implementing innovative offerings to help their clients successfully address the financial complexity and challenges of living in retirement," says LifeYield's CEO Mark Hoffman. "SunTrust's investment in LifeYield further underscores SunTrust's commitment to being an innovator in the retirement solutions arena."

But it's not as though SunTrust Private Wealth Management and LifeYield team members have never rubbed shoulders before. Peters' division offers an in-house unified managed account (UMA) featuring overlay-management technology from a unit of Fiserv's CheckFree that started out as Upstream Technologies, a trade-order-management provider founded or staffed by several of LifeYield's founders including Hoffman.

UMAs are fee-based, single-CUSIP investment products that, generally speaking, feature combinations of separately managed accounts, mutual funds and ETFs. Overlay management has to do with account-level rebalancing, restrictions, cash flows, and, where relevant, tax-liability management.

SunTrust's Investment Services group also distributes a UMA from PNC's third-party investment platform provider Advisorport. It too uses overlay technology that Fiserv acquired from Upstream via CheckFree.

SunTrust had total assets of $174.8 billion at the end of September 2008. -FWR

Purchase reproduction rights to this article.