Strategic Acquisition Brief · Confidential
Dynamic Default is scaling auto-annuitization seven-fold. CareMatters pairs protection with long-term care. Every one of those allocations rests on a question only a household-level engine can answer defensibly: how much guaranteed income — and how much protection — does this particular household actually need? MaxiFi computes it: provably, auditable, and, because the math is exact, guaranteeably.
The growth case →Request the briefingNationwide's record 2025 and the seven-fold scaling of Dynamic Default put annuity allocations inside the QDIA for thousands of plans — a bold answer to the pension gap that hands every fiduciary a question: how much income does this household need, and when? Today the participant experience answers with Monte Carlo and population averages — the same rented math as every rival recordkeeper. The engine that computes the household-level answer converts the default from a product placement into a provable promise.
Empower, Fidelity, and Principal are racing to personalize with conventional Monte Carlo tooling; Lincoln and Corebridge sell the same annuities without the answer. None can substantiate the claim that matters to a fiduciary. MaxiFi solves the lifetime plan — income need, claiming age, withdrawal sequence, protection and long-term-care sizing from consumption smoothing — same inputs, same answer, every time, with an audit trail.
That changes what the claim is. Backed by the pedigree — thirty years of Laurence Kotlikoff's economics, taught with at MIT Sloan by Nobel laureate Robert Merton — and by the reproducible computations themselves, the accuracy claim stops being puffery and becomes a substantiated statement of fact. And determinism unlocks what a claim alone never could: a bounded Accuracy Guarantee with a defined remedy — the play that built TurboTax's franchise, never before available in planning, insurable only because the math is exact.
The substantiation regime that polices financial advertising — FINRA 2210's fair-and-not-misleading standard, FTC substantiation doctrine — protects this claim. Rivals can run vague accuracy language; what they cannot run is your claim: the specific, falsifiable, guaranteed one. Copying it without the engine is a false claim regulators, NAD panels, and Lanham Act suits will punish.
Each Dynamic Default allocation inherits a computed, household-level “why this much” — attach economics on fiduciary-grade footing, across 2.7M participants.
Substantiated, auditable, guaranteed methodology — the checkbox no rival recordkeeper or annuity manufacturer can tick.
Life, disability, and long-term-care need computed from consumption smoothing, not rules of thumb — premium growth the compliance department can love.
The engine's architect is the featured economist of the Alliance for Lifetime Income — the intellectual foundation of protected income, brought in-house.
| Empower / Fidelity / Principal | Lincoln / Corebridge | Nationwide + MaxiFi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The income answer | Monte Carlo personalization | Product-led | Computed — and guaranteed |
| The fiduciary's question | Trust the simulation | Trust the product | Audit the computation yourself |
| Can rivals copy it? | The words, not the proof | The words, not the proof | One engine exists; imitation is a false claim |
One quarter of the engine under Dynamic Default — computed income needs, sized protection, the guarantee — answers what no forecast can. Owning MaxiFi is the exclusive right to run that play, and to deny it to Empower, Fidelity, Principal, Lincoln, and Corebridge permanently. It is a revenue line, not a legal reserve.
MaxiFi (Economic Security Planning, Inc.) uses consumption smoothing and dynamic programming to compute the single, mathematically optimal lifetime plan — solving simultaneously across Social Security strategy, federal and state taxes, Roth-conversion sequencing, withdrawal order, insurance sizing, and upside investing. For a household's facts and assumptions it solves — not guesses: same inputs, same answer, every time, with an audit trail.
Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff — William Fairfield Warren Professor at Boston University; Harvard Ph.D.; former Senior Economist, President's Council of Economic Advisers; named by The Economist among the 25 most influential economists.
Taught with at MIT Sloan by Nobel laureate Robert Merton as an “outstanding science-based lifecycle and retirement management platform” (Merton does not endorse products); featured in Bankrate's “Best financial planning software of 2025” roundup. The economics trace to Nobel-recognized lifecycle work.
Patented algorithms and thirty years of continuously maintained federal/state tax, Social Security, and benefit rules with a validation record — exactly the IP a language model cannot reverse-engineer and a build team cannot shortcut.
Larry Kotlikoff intends to stay on with the acquirer — to integrate the engine, validate the training and guarantee programs, and continue as spokesperson. The acquirer buys the engine and keeps the economist who built it.
MaxiFi computes each participant's lifetime plan from plan and payroll data; the Dynamic Default allocation inherits its household-level justification; CareMatters and protection products inherit computed sizing; the Accuracy Guarantee ships with the plan. An engine your systems call — not a platform to migrate to. Larry Kotlikoff stays on to integrate and as spokesperson.
A default that buys an annuity will be asked to show its work — by fiduciaries, by regulators, by participants' counsel. Population-average glide paths are an answer; a deterministic, auditable, household-level computation is a defense. MaxiFi converts the protected-income pipeline from a supervisory question into an exhibit: computed, verifiable, reproducible, with disclosed assumptions and versioned law tables.
And the engine ships with the architecture that keeps the floor solid under an advertised claim: assumptions and law-table version disclosed on every output, customer input attestation, versioned rule tables with re-run notices on law changes, and the Accuracy Guarantee's defined remedy. The audit trail proves each customer was told exactly what was — and wasn't — promised.
We price the asset on the growth case above. The defense beneath it is a term of the deal, not the deal — and, like the claim itself, it is denied to every competitor the day it is yours.
A frontier model's retirement “smile” ran 13% too low in each of a real household's 40 remaining years against MaxiFi's computed path — dated, dollar-specific, reproducible.
Four frontier AIs sized the same father's coverage at $1.3M, $1.4M, and $3.8M — against MaxiFi's internally consistent $2.09M. Every shortcut the AIs used is programmable — and wrong.
One retirement question, three frontier engines, three different verdicts — with MIT's Andrew Lo noting these tools carry no best-interest duty. The category estimates; the divergence is the proof.
The tests publish to 145,000+ subscribers and counting — credibility no rival in the category can match, and it conveys with the acquisition.
Larry is the featured economist of the movement that made protected income mainstream. We are deliberate about where his engine lands: the company scaling guaranteed income into the default for ordinary working households is where the computation does the most good. That is why this conversation.
The next step: a 30-minute briefing — MaxiFi solves a real household's lifetime plan, live, while a frontier model is asked to match it. The gap is the thesis; the funnel is the price.
Michael Kane, Ph.D., J.D. · Managing Partner, Kane & Company · FINRA / SEC / SIPC–Registered Investment Bank
Commerce@kaneco.com · 310-441-5263 · Representing Economic Security Planning, Inc.