Lighthouse Financial Services Company — How the Beacon Index Advantage business case will be measured after launch, who owns each measure, and the pre-committed thresholds at which the carrier acts. Status as at 16 October 2026, 507 days before the first policy is issued.
- What This Plan Is For — and Why It Is Not a Value Claim
- Benefits Realized to Date: Zero, and Correct
- The Six Measured Benefits
- Benefit Detail
- Pre-Committed Trigger Thresholds
- The Tolerance Already Consumed
- The Governance Cliff After Gate 5
- Handover to the Operating Line
- Measurement Gaps
- Document Control & Related Documents
1. What This Plan Is For — and Why It Is Not a Value Claim
Most benefits realization plans exist to claim value: they enumerate savings, attach owners, and report progress toward a number the program promised. This one cannot do that, for three structural reasons that are worth stating plainly before any benefit is listed.
- The benefit case can fail. The approved return is 13.4% against an 11.0% hurdle, but the disclosed downside is 10.1% — it does not clear. This is the only suite in the portfolio whose business case carries a scenario that fails, disclosed rather than closed.
- The return cannot be observed for a decade. An internal rate of return on a fifteen-year cohort is not a measurement, it is a projection, until the block has substantially run off. Nobody will know the real answer while anyone involved still owns it.
- There is no governance body left to receive the answer. Gate 5 convenes 07 September 2028, 185 days after launch. It can read a partial first year and nothing more. Then the Gate Review Board dissolves.
2. Benefits Realized to Date: Zero, and Correct
No benefit in this plan has been realized, and none could have been. The product does not exist in market until 06 March 2028; every measure below reads zero because there is nothing yet to read. Reporting $0 realized at the status date is the accurate position, not an underperformance. A benefits plan that showed early partial realization on an unlaunched product would be measuring something other than the product.
3. The Six Measured Benefits
| ID | Benefit | Owner | First readable | Linked risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BEN-01 | Premium volume against plan | R. Castellanos | Month 1 after launch | R-07 / I-06 |
| BEN-02 | GLWB rider election rate | D. Falkner | Month 3 after launch | R-06 |
| BEN-03 | Persistency against the pricing lapse basis | T. Brennan | Month 15 after launch | R-09 |
| BEN-04 | Average case size | H. Kirkpatrick | Month 1 after launch | R-11 |
| BEN-05 | Crediting strategy mix | E. Kowalczyk | Month 3 after launch | R-12 |
| BEN-06 | Capital efficiency against the 4.2% basis | J. Whitmore | Month 12 after launch | R-09 |
They are ordered by when they become readable, not by size. That ordering is the whole design: a benefit that cannot be read until Month 15 cannot serve as an early warning, however important it is. BEN-01 and BEN-04 carry the early-warning load precisely because they are legible from the first month of sales.
4. Benefit Detail
BEN-01 — Premium volume against plan
Measure
Monthly written premium vs the plan curve.
Why it is on this list
Carries the entire case. The model proves volume is the only variable that moves the return, because fixed run cost is the sole element that does not scale.
BEN-02 — GLWB rider election rate
Measure
Rider elections as a share of policies issued, against the 62% pricing assumption.
Why it is on this list
Rider fee income is a material share of product margin. Election running below assumption reduces margin without reducing the capital held.
BEN-03 — Persistency against the pricing lapse basis
Measure
Actual lapse experience vs the pricing curve, first credible read after one full policy year.
Why it is on this list
The slowest benefit to read and the one that most changes the answer. Nothing credible exists before the first policy anniversary.
BEN-04 — Average case size
Measure
Mean single premium per policy issued vs the $118,000 assumption.
Why it is on this list
A leading indicator for BEN-01: case size and policy count decompose volume, and they fail for different reasons -- one is a distribution problem, the other an advisor-mix problem.
BEN-05 — Crediting strategy mix
Measure
Share of premium allocated to each of the three launch strategies.
Why it is on this list
Not a value benefit -- a concentration control. D-03 reduced five strategies to three, which was raised at Gate 1 as creating hedging concentration.
BEN-06 — Capital efficiency against the 4.2% basis
Measure
Actual required capital as a share of account value vs the modeled 4.2%.
Why it is on this list
The Gate 1 recycle turned on this ratio being wrong by 87 basis points. It is now measured rather than assumed.
5. Pre-Committed Trigger Thresholds
The business-case model establishes that fixed run cost is the only element that does not scale with sales volume. Product margin and required capital both scale, so a proportional shortfall would leave the return untouched; it is operating leverage alone that converts lower volume into a lower return. That result has a useful consequence: sales volume against plan is a sufficient early indicator of the return, and it is readable from the first month.
The thresholds below are computed from the model, not chosen:
| Volume vs plan | Projected IRR | NPV at hurdle | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| +0% | 13.40% | $11,009,118 | clears |
| -5% | 12.94% | $8,618,608 | clears |
| -10% | 12.45% | $6,228,098 | clears |
| -15% | 11.92% | $3,837,588 | clears |
| -20% | 11.36% | $1,447,077 | clears |
| -25% | 10.76% | $-943,433 | FAILS |
| -30% | 10.10% | $-3,333,943 | FAILS |
Committed responses
| Trailing 6-month volume vs plan | Status | Committed response |
|---|---|---|
| Better than −10% | Green | Routine reporting to the product line only. |
| −10% to −18% | Amber | Escalate to the Chief Product Officer; distribution remediation plan required within 30 days. |
| Worse than −18% | Red | Formal reforecast of the business case, tabled to the executive committee, with a re-pricing or repositioning recommendation. |
The amber band deliberately triggers before the 23% breakeven rather than at it. A threshold set at the point of failure is not a warning — it is a post-mortem with better timing.
6. The Tolerance Already Consumed
The plan tolerates a 23% volume shortfall. Written commitments from the three largest IMO partners, obtained under GC-04, total $168,000,000 against a Year 1 target of $185,000,000 — -9.2% against plan before a single policy is sold.
40% of the available volume tolerance is consumed at the status date.
7. The Governance Cliff After Gate 5
Gate 5 convenes 07 September 2028 and reviews the post-launch window to 01 Sep 2028. It is the last event in the program's governance, and it can read BEN-01, BEN-04 and BEN-05 on partial data, BEN-02 on a first partial read, and neither BEN-03 nor BEN-06 at all.
| Benefit | Readable at Gate 5? |
|---|---|
| BEN-01 Premium volume | Partial — ~6 months of sales |
| BEN-02 Rider election | Partial |
| BEN-03 Persistency | No — needs a full policy year |
| BEN-04 Average case size | Partial |
| BEN-05 Crediting mix | Partial |
| BEN-06 Capital efficiency | No — needs 12 months in force |
8. Handover to the Operating Line
Because governance ends before measurement does, benefit ownership must transfer to a body that outlives the program. Gate 5's formal outputs include that transfer, and this plan specifies it.
| Transfers to | Cadence | What is reported |
|---|---|---|
| Product line P&L owner (Product Management & Design) | Monthly | BEN-01, BEN-04, BEN-05 against plan, with the §5 trigger bands applied |
| Corporate Actuarial | Annual experience study | BEN-02, BEN-03, BEN-06 against the pricing basis |
| Chief Financial Officer | Annual, to the executive committee | Return against the Gate 1 case, with the variance stated in whichever direction it runs |
The transfer is a handover of measurement obligations, not of the benefits themselves. The product line already owns the P&L; what it does not automatically inherit is the obligation to report actuals against what Gate 1 was told, which is a different and easily-dropped discipline.
9. Measurement Gaps
Stated openly, on the same principle the Gate Conditions Register applies to conditions: a plan that lists only what it can do is not a plan.
| ID | Gap |
|---|---|
| BG-01 | No instrument compels reporting after Gate 5. The handover at §8 is specified by this plan, not by a contract, a charter clause, or a standing committee mandate. Every party named could decline it without breaching anything. This is the most consequential gap in the document. |
| BG-02 | Two benefits are unreadable at the only remaining governance event. BEN-03 and BEN-06 need a full policy year; Gate 5 sits at 185 days. The two measures most likely to move the return are the two the Board will never see. |
| BG-03 | No agreed attribution method for competitive effects. If volume disappoints, the plan cannot distinguish a distribution failure from a market in which every carrier's indexed annuity sales fell. Comparison is to plan, not to peers, because no peer data source has been funded. |
| BG-04 | The trigger bands at §5 bind nobody outside the program. They are the Chair's committed responses while the program exists. After Gate 5 they are advice. |
| BG-05 | Rider election and persistency interact, and the plan measures them separately. Higher election with worse persistency can look neutral in aggregate while changing the shape of the guarantee exposure materially. Corporate Actuarial's experience study handles this; the monthly reporting cannot. |
10. Document Control & Related Documents
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 11 Jun 2026 | Opened at the Gate 1 second convening alongside the approved business case. |
| 1.1 | 16 Oct 2026 | Trigger thresholds recomputed from the business-case model. Tolerance-consumed figure added at §6 following the GC-04 closure. No benefit realized; no change to the benefit set. |
Related documents: Cost-Benefit Analysis §5–7 · Gate 1 Business Case Package · Gate Conditions Register (GC-04 efficacy finding) · RAIDD Log (I-06, R-07) · Stage-Gate Governance Model (Gate 5 mandate).
Maintained by C. Tyrrell, NPD Program Manager and Chair of the Gate Review Board, until the Gate 5 handover at §8.