Human Interest and Income Lab streamline workflows for retirement-focused advisors

Two retirement-focused fintech firms have introduced technology upgrades aimed at helping financial advisors reduce administrative burdens and deliver faster, more personalized service to clients.

Human Interest, which declares itself a retirement industry disruptor, has launched a digital dashboard that consolidates multiple aspects of 401(k) plan management into a single interface.

Built in consultation with dozens of financial professionals and backed by over 50,000 hours of development, the new PartnerConnect platform is intended to help advisors oversee investment lineups, manage client proposals, and engage with participant data more efficiently.

"Advisors are on the front lines of the effort to help investors and businesses navigate our challenging retirement system – and their partnership is crucial to Human Interest’s mission to deliver retirement plans for people from all lines of work," Rakesh Mahajan, chief revenue officer at Human Interest, said in a statement Wednesday.

Features of the new platform include customizable fund lineups from a menu of more than 3,000 investment options, tools for bulk fund mapping, and ParticipantIQ, a functionality that flags key client milestones such as retirement eligibility, termination, or salary changes.

With PartnerConnect, Human Interest said it aims to eliminate manual tasks and reliance on email, spreadsheets, and fragmented legacy systems that plague advisors working on clients' retirement planning.

The new launch follows the company’s earlier rollout of a customer experience guarantee, which promises to answer administrator queries within four business hours and process participant distributions within two days. Human Interest has also committed to financial compensation when those standards are not met.

Meanwhile, Income Lab, a developer of retirement planning software, has announced a new real-time integration with Schwab Advisor Services, designed to help advisors build and update retirement plans faster.

The integration uses a direct API to pull data from Schwab Advisor Center into Income Lab’s interface, reducing the time needed to create comprehensive planning reports. The company said the update reflects growing advisor demand for tools that reduce friction in the planning process.

"By making retirement planning faster and more efficient, we streamline advisors’ processes, giving them more time to serve more people," Johnny Poulsen, co-founder and CEO of Income Lab, said in a separate announcement.

The need to help Americans with their retirement income planning is clear to see in survey research from Allianz Life, with the insurer's 2024 Annual Retirement Study showing less than half of respondents have a plan for taking their retirement income. While two-thirds of boomer respondents said they have one, only 30 percent of Gen Xers and less than 33 percent of millennials said the same.

Alison Dooher, head of Schwab Digital Advisor Solutions, added, "The ability to quickly include account balances and details within Income Lab are the type of functionality that advisors continually tell us they need to effectively and efficiently serve clients."

Income Lab has earned repeat recognition in T3/Inside Information's advisor tech report, with surveyed advisors ranking it as the highest-rated tool for retirement distribution planning in 2023, 2024, and 2025. Alongside FP Alpha, T3 said it has "energized what was once a sleepy fintech category," with Income Lab logging three times the advisor usage of its closest competitor this year.