Launch Readiness Criteria — Beacon Index Advantage

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Harborline

Aug 2025

Cancelled

Gate 0

Feb 2026

Stage 1

Business case

Gate 1

Apr 2026

Recycled

Gate 1

Jun 2026

Go w/ conditions

Stage 2

Development

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Gate 2

Apr 2027

Gate 3

Oct 2027

Gate 4

Feb 2028

Launch

Mar 2028

Gate 5

Sep 2028

Lighthouse Financial Services Company — The conditions under which Beacon Index Advantage does not launch on 06 March 2028, who decides each one, and what happens when it fires. Adopted for verification at Gate 4 on 24 February 2028, 11 days before launch.

Criteria defined

Absolute no-go

Partial — hold back scope

Days from Gate 4 to launch

Contents

What This Document Is Actually For
The No-Go Criteria
Pre-Committed Responses
The Decision This Document Cannot Make
What Is Deliberately Not a No-Go
Verification and Timing
Gaps

1. What This Document Is Actually For

A launch readiness document's real job is to define the conditions under which you do NOT launch. Everything else in it is decoration. Anyone can list what needs to be true on launch day; the hard part is committing, in advance, to the specific failures that would stop a date the whole organization has been pointed at for two years.

This program makes that harder than usual, and it is better to say so here than to discover it in February 2028. The launch date has never moved. It survived the Gate 1 recycle, which was absorbed by compressing Stage 2 from 46 weeks to 40 rather than by moving 06 March 2028. That is a real achievement, and it is also a pattern.

An organization that has always protected the date will protect it again. The moment to decide what would override it is before somebody is asked to — which is why these criteria are adopted at Gate 4, 11 days out, rather than assembled in the final weeks when every answer is shaped by how much it would cost to say no.

So the criteria below are written as no-go conditions with named deciders and pre-committed responses. Not a checklist of things that should be true — a list of things that, if false, stop something.

2. The No-Go Criteria

ID	Domain	Condition	Decider	Effect
NG-01	Regulatory	Fewer than the agreed minimum number of states approved, or neither large non-Compact market approved.	Gate Review Board	Absolute no-go
NG-02	Regulatory	Any approved state's filing conditions differ materially from the illustrated product.	General Counsel	Partial — hold back scope
NG-03	Product / systems	Any open severity-1 defect in issue, servicing or illustration.	Platform Delivery Lead	Absolute no-go
NG-04	Product / systems	A severity-2 defect whose workaround is not documented, staffed and accepted by Operations.	Head of Operations	Absolute no-go
NG-05	Risk	Hedging program not live and reconciled against a shadow book for a full month.	CFO, with CRO consulted	Absolute no-go
NG-06	Risk	Reinsurance treaty not executed, or executed on terms that change the capital treatment assumed in pricing.	Chief Actuary	Absolute no-go
NG-07	Operations	End-to-end cycle not completed by trained operations staff without build-team intervention.	Head of Operations	Absolute no-go
NG-08	Distribution	Advisor training completion below the agreed threshold in any channel intended for launch.	Head of Distribution	Partial — hold back scope
NG-09	Distribution	Wholesaler coverage materially below plan at launch.	Head of Distribution	Not a no-go

Absolute stops the launch entirely. Partial holds back a state or a channel and lets the rest proceed — which is only viable because the product launches into a footprint rather than a single market. The distinction is doing real work: without it, every regulatory or distribution imperfection becomes a full-launch argument.

3. Pre-Committed Responses

Each criterion carries its response now, so that the response is not being invented by the people under the most pressure to avoid it.

ID	Pre-committed response
NG-01	Launch is deferred to the next viable window. The threshold itself is still undecided — see §4.
NG-02	That state is withheld from launch and activated after remediation. Launch proceeds elsewhere.
NG-03	Absolute no-go. No workaround is acceptable for an S1 in these three paths.
NG-04	Treated as S1 until the workaround is staffed. Staffing is the test, not documentation.
NG-05	Absolute no-go. The guarantee cannot be sold before it can be hedged.
NG-06	No-go if capital treatment changes; the business case returns to a gate.
NG-07	Absolute no-go. A product only the build team can operate is not launched, it is demonstrated.
NG-08	That channel is held back. Launch proceeds in channels that are ready.
NG-09	Not a no-go. It is a volume risk, disclosed and monitored — see §5 for why this one is deliberately excluded.

NG-04 is the criterion most likely to be argued. A severity-2 defect with a workaround is exactly the item that arrives late and looks survivable. The rule treats it as an S1 until the workaround is staffed — not until it is documented. Documentation is cheap and can be produced in an afternoon; staffing costs somebody a person, which is the test. The Test & Validation Strategy uses the same rule at §5, and the two documents must not diverge on it.

4. The Decision This Document Cannot Make

NG-01 refers to a threshold that does not exist yet. The Regulatory Filing Plan proposes a minimum launch footprint and recommends it be decided at Gate 3. Until a gate adopts it, the single most likely trigger of a launch-readiness conversation has no pre-agreed answer, and NG-01 is a criterion that names a number nobody has committed to.

This is stated rather than papered over because the alternative is worse. A readiness document that quietly assumed a threshold would give the appearance of a decision without the substance of one, and the gap would surface at exactly the moment it could not be closed calmly — with a trained sales force, a marketing date and a Board that has been told the program is ready.

Action: the Chair is tabling the threshold for decision at Gate 3 on 28 October 2027. If Gate 3 declines to set it, this document should record that the program has chosen to enter its launch window without a footprint rule.

5. What Is Deliberately Not a No-Go

A criteria list that includes everything important stops discriminating. Three items were considered and excluded.

Considered	Why it is not a no-go
Wholesaler coverage below plan (NG-09)	Six were planned and four are committed. This is a volume risk — disclosed, monitored, and material to the business case — but launching with four wholesalers is a worse commercial outcome, not an unsafe one. Treating it as a no-go would put a distribution staffing question on the same footing as an unhedged guarantee.
Year 1 written commitments below target	Already true and already disclosed ($168,000,000 against $185,000,000). A no-go criterion that is already failing at the time of writing is not a criterion; it is a decision the program has already taken and should own openly.
Competitor launching in the same quarter	Outside the carrier's control and not a safety or compliance matter. It changes what launch is worth, not whether launch is possible.

The line being drawn is between “this would be bad” and “this must stop us”. Everything in §2 is a matter of the carrier being unable to issue, service, illustrate, hedge or lawfully sell the product. Commercial disappointment, however large, is governed by the business case and the Benefits Realization Plan — not by this document.

6. Verification and Timing

When	What happens
Gate 4 — 24 Feb 2028	Each criterion is certified by its named decider on evidence, not on assertion. Gate 4 is where launch readiness is judged; this document is its scoring instrument.
Gate 4 + 30 days	Re-confirmation of NG-03, NG-04 and NG-07 only — the three that can regress after certification because they depend on live systems and live people.
Launch minus 10 business days	Final confirmation by the Chair to the sponsor. No new criteria may be introduced at this point; a criterion invented in the final fortnight is an opinion with a deadline attached.
Launch — 06 Mar 2028	First policy issued. This document is closed and BEN measurement begins.

7. Gaps

ID	Gap
LR-01	NG-01's threshold is undecided. See §4. The most consequential criterion in the document currently names a number nobody has agreed.
LR-02	No criterion has an escalation path if its decider says go and another disagrees. Each condition names one decider. Where two domains disagree — a partial-approval state that Distribution wants and Legal does not — the document is silent and it would land with the Chair, who has no vote.
LR-03	“Advisor training completion below the agreed threshold” (NG-08) has the same problem as NG-01 in miniature — the threshold is referenced, not set. It is lower stakes and it is the same defect.
LR-04	Nothing here can stop a launch after it has begun. These are pre-launch criteria. Once policies are being issued, withdrawal is a market-conduct and regulatory matter far outside this document, and no artifact in the program addresses it.

Owned by C. Tyrrell, NPD Program Manager and Chair of the Gate Review Board, with each criterion certified by its named decider. Related: Master Test & Validation Strategy · Regulatory Filing Plan §4 · Gate Decision Framework · Benefits Realization Plan.