New York Life received the Retirement Income Industry Association's 2012 Practitioner Thought Leadership Award.

Dylan Huang, corporate vice president; Matthew Grove, vice president; and Todd Taylor, actuarial director, received this honor for their paper "The Efficient Income Frontier: A Product Allocation Framework for Retirement."

The work explains the need for a different approach to evaluating risk and return when an individual's portfolio transitions from accumulating assets to using them to provide retirement income. In retirement, individuals shift from a traditional evaluation of risk and return to outcome-based measures: Income Risk, the risk of running out of money in retirement; Legacy Potential, the assets available to transfer to heirs; and the level of safe inflation-adjusted retirement spending. The paper establishes the rationale for this new approach and then builds a case for a new type of efficient frontier, the Efficient Income Frontier, as a method for determining the optimal mix of asset classes in retirement.