Company-sponsored retirement plans come with complex day-to-day responsibilities and fiduciary risk, even for companies with full-time benefits staff. An experienced retirement plan advisor can help you reduce risk and workload, manage plan cost, and design solutions that engage your employees and prepare them for retirement.

While a traditional financial advisor helps individual clients plan for life events, a retirement plan advisor focuses on helping corporate clients manage their employer-sponsored retirement plans. Retirement advisors are specialists in plan operations, design, compliance and fiduciary responsibilities. They also serve as the liaison among your plan providers like your recordkeeper, investment managers, CPA, attorney and third-party administrator.

Retirement plan advisors can help you navigate ERISA requirements andevaluate recordkeepers and other vendors, ensuring you receive services that align with your goals and fiduciary responsibilities.

Advisors provide:

• Plan design expertise
• Independent plan oversight
• Retirement plan vendor selection
• Fiduciary services
• Unbiased investment selection and monitoring
• Understanding of fee structures
• Participant education and support

Retirement plan advisors design plans with employees’ needs and interests in mind and offer participants impartial guidance and support. Advisors can help improve employee outcomes by supporting increased participation, higher savings rates and retirement readiness.

Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, any employer sponsor of a retirement plan is a fiduciary. Today, fiduciaries have a lot on their plates: from ensuring plan investments are prudently selected and monitored to administrative tasks like delivering required participant notices and handling of loans and hardship distributions.

When it comes to fiduciary responsibility, retirement plan advisors:

• Help you make informed and impartial decisions.
• Assist in maintaining documentation of decisions, should you be questioned or audited.
• Help you find vendors that can handle many of your administrative duties, often at a significant cost savings.
• May provide investment advice to you, your participants or investment committee.
• May share fiduciary responsibility with you or help you find a third party that will do so.
• Help you delegate administrative fiduciary responsibilities for certain tasks.
  
  Whether your goals are to help employees prepare for the future, attract and retain talent or manage benefits costs, a retirement advisor can provide invaluable support.