Strategic Acquisition Brief · Confidential
Principal LifeTime Income Builder puts guaranteed income inside the QDIA. Beam Benefits puts AI-native technology inside the benefits stack. MaxiFi completes the architecture: the deterministic engine that computes what each participant should save, claim, withdraw, and protect — to the dollar, auditable, and — because the math is exact — guaranteeable.
The growth case →Request the briefingJune 30 — the LifeTime Income Builder Index CITs embed guaranteed income inside a QDIA-eligible target-date structure, allocating to a fixed indexed annuity from around age 47: a bold answer to the pension gap that makes one question urgent for every fiduciary — how much income does this particular household actually need? July 7 — acquiring Beam Benefits, cloud-native and AI at its core, showed how Principal builds its future: by buying keystone technology, not renting it. MaxiFi is the same move one level deeper — not another product on the shelf, but the optimization engine beneath every product you already sell.
Empower and Fidelity are racing to own the personalization answer with conventional Monte Carlo tooling — population averages, replacement-rate rules of thumb, the same rented math as every rival. None can substantiate the claim that matters to a fiduciary. MaxiFi can: for a household's facts and assumptions it solves — not guesses — the lifetime plan, every dollar of taxes and Social Security computed under current law, 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.
A default that buys an annuity needs a defensible “why this much.” Substantiated, auditable, guaranteed methodology is the checkbox no rival recordkeeper can tick — the wedge that wins SMB plans on demonstrated outcomes.
Every participant in a LifeTime Income Builder lineup gets a computed lifetime plan — saving rate, claiming age, retirement timing, withdrawal sequence. The default becomes a personalized promise.
MaxiFi sizes life and disability coverage from consumption smoothing, not rules of thumb — the analytical bridge between the Beam stack and Principal's protection products.
A raised 15–17% ROE target rewards exactly this shape of asset: software economics, no balance-sheet strain, a moat that deepens as AI makes the correct computation the scarce input.
| Empower / Fidelity | Prudential / Lincoln | Principal + MaxiFi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The personalization claim | Managed-account Monte Carlo | 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 a LifeTime Income Builder lineup — computed plans at enrollment, the guarantee behind them — answers what no forecast can. Owning MaxiFi is the exclusive right to run that play, and to deny it to Empower, Fidelity, Prudential, and Lincoln 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 annuity allocation inherits a household-level “why this much”; planners and advisors review and own the relationship; the Accuracy Guarantee ships with the plan. The Beam playbook, one level deeper: buy the keystone, make it the layer everything else stands on. Larry Kotlikoff stays on to integrate and as spokesperson.
Age-based glide paths and income-replacement ratios are population averages; fiduciaries, regulators, and participants will ask for the household-level answer. In the first FINRA exam cycle to treat generative AI as a standalone topic — supervision reaching the reliability and accuracy of the AI model, obligations reaching embedded third-party tools — MaxiFi converts scaled personalization from an examination liability into an examination exhibit: computed, verifiable, reproducible, hardened by a thirty-year validation record.
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.
We are deliberate about where MaxiFi lands: a company built on securing ordinary working households is the home where this engine does the most good for the most real people. That is why we are bringing it back to Principal now, at the moment your lifetime-income strategy makes it a keystone.
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.