Our depth of experience in participant education has equipped us with effective solutions for participants’ challenges with savings rates, investment strategies, retirement readiness, and broader financial wellness. Many of our competitors prefer not to design client fiduciary meetings centered on intense participant-related discussions because they simply don’t have effective solutions to offer.
We actually impact peoples’ lives. Many firms like ours are consumed with money management. Charts and graphs and acronyms. We focus on how people save, invest, and manage their money. The best part about doing our work within the retirement context is that we get to help a lot of people within three distinct groups: business owners to feel safer and to focus on their employees; HR and benefits professionals to enjoy their jobs more; and hundreds to thousands of employees to live happier, less stressful lives.
3 Simple Steps to Improve Your Plan
1. Hire an Investment Manager Fiduciary under ERISA 3(38):
Simply put, your current advisor or service representative may not be willing or able to serve in the capacity of Investment Manager Fiduciary for one of two reasons. One, he/she is prohibited to do so because of the services they provide, or the way they are compensated. Or two, he/she does not have the expertise or interest in taking on the liability to serve in this capacity. If your advisor is not willing to help you legally discharge your investment liability, you may want to consider modifying the relationship with your advisor.
Our Solution: Qualified Plan Advisors (QPA) works closely with your current Plan-level Fiduciary Advisor. We have a long track record of collaborating with third-party advisors, who provide their plan-level services, while we provide our participant-level services. If you do not currently work with a Plan-level Advisor, Qualified Plan Advisors can also sign on in that capacity as your Investment Manager Fiduciary under ERISA 3(38). This arrangement will legally discharge you from the investment liability of the core fund offerings.
2. Provide easy to use, sensible ways to help participants diversify:
It is our opinion that this single factor is the root cause of the majority of participant underperformance issues.
Our Solution: Give participants the opportunity to choose, or be defaulted to Risk-Based Professionally Managed Portfolios. These portfolios have between nine and 12 funds to help boost diversification in a meaningful way. Additionally, we manage these under ERISA 3(38), hence legally discharging your decision makers from the liability of the ongoing management of these portfolios.
3. Engage in real conversations, face to face:
The larger industry vendors have done a great job of providing online tools for determining what and how one should invest. Access to these tools and information is not the challenge in the industry. The challenge is that participants simply do not know how to, or do not choose to use the tools. We believe the DELIVERY of the tools is as IMPORTANT as the TOOLS themselves.
Our Solution: We have found that no single step provides more value to a plan, nor has a bigger impact on your participants, than putting people in front of people. That is, engaging in meaningful conversations with a true professional advisor who cares and understands the steps necessary to reach retirement successfully. We can provide several client referrals who can attest that our team approach, and commitment to comprehensive manpower, provides significant improvements in participation, proper deferral amounts, and appropriate investment allocations.