Wealthspire Retirement Advisory

Foster long-term success – and employee trust – with our time-tested tools and best practices.

Fiduciary duties can be daunting: a fiduciary is obligated to act in plan participants' best interests by meeting stringent, complex legal standards. What's more, even with a third-party administrator a company is often still subject to fiduciary liability to some degree, making careful planning a must. Our experts focus on empowering clients with the tools and advice necessary to ensure no responsibility is overlooked, protecting your business.

Our Fiduciary Fitness Program™

This proprietary program lets you measure the health of your plan by zeroing in on any existing fiduciary gaps, reviewing the proper process, documenting who’s responsible for what and giving you a long-term plan.

The program makes it easier for you to:

• Identify plan fiduciaries and understand the extent of their specific responsibilities
• Attempt to comply with ERISA §404(a) and §404(c)
• Document the hiring process for service providers
• Identify parties in interest to the plan and take steps to monitor transactions
• Understand major exemptions under ERISA that permit transactions with parties in interest
• Review plan documents in light of current plan operations and make necessary updates
• Comply with reporting and disclosure requirements
• Ensure that individuals are properly bonded and covered by liability insurance, and more

Fiduciary Best Practices

Our best practices will make sure your i’s are dotted and your t’s are crossed. You’ll have access to:

• Fiduciary Diagnostic™: This periodic compliance gap analysis demonstrates what plan sponsors and fiduciaries need to address, and documents plan management responsibilities in over 20 key areas.
• Fiduciary Plan Review™: This review examines plan design and documents prudent processes.
• Education Modules: The modules cover over 20 education topics from fiduciary responsibilities to employer securities and real property to mergers and acquisitions.
• Documentation modules: You’ll receive guidelines for documenting compliance, including positive evidence of fulfilling fiduciary obligations under ERISA and tax requirements under the Internal Revenue Code.

Engage and support your employees with a high-impact retirement program.

Creating a successful, competitive retirement plan isn’t just about the numbers. You need methods to encourage employee participation and ready them for retirement. Using Courageous Plan Design™, we’re able to create a cost-effective solution that can help improve plan health through:

• Automatic enrollment
• Higher minimum deferral rates
• Automatic deferral escalation
• Employer matching programs
• Elimination of loans and hardship provisions

Help Employees Help Themselves

Employers spend a lot of time, money and energy creating retirement plans and encouraging participation. But many employees still contribute too little to their plans or even nothing at all. Why?

Under traditional defined contribution plans, employees have to sign up to start saving. With Courageous Plan Design and our proprietary PLANavigator™ technology, the paradigm is flipped — you automatically enroll employees and they have to opt out of the plan instead of into it. The default contribution rate is also higher than the standard, and contribution rates automatically go up each year. Add to that other forward-thinking plan elements, including stringent savings leak prevention and simplified investing options, and the results can be phenomenal.

The Power of Automation

Automation steers employees toward saving for their retirement while maintaining their freedom to make their own choices. Making enrollment in a retirement plan the default might feel like forcing your employees to do something. The reality, though, is that no matter how a plan is designed, the default action nudges them in a direction. Our retirement professionals can help you design a system that makes saving as easy as doing nothing, upping participation and improving your employees' financial health.

Automatic enrollment empowers you to help your employees to help themselves. By setting them up to build retirement assets with pretax employee contributions, you can help them start saving even if they don’t do a thing. And that’s just the beginning.

We’ll help you select an automatic deferral rate and the right automatic increases that can really up the savings potential.

Boost satisfaction and give employees the best chance possible at a strong financial future through one-on-one, live consultations with experts.

Our dedicated advisors can create a customized plan that positions each person to reach their financial potential. Each tailored strategy takes into account a person’s life goals, risk tolerance, liquidity needs and other unique circumstances.

Your employees will have an extensive financial profile review with a custom analysis on a range of financial needs, including:

• Retirement assets
• Non-retirement assets
• Investment selection
• Asset protection
• 529 college planning
• IRA rollovers
• Investment diversification

Invest in proven fund management methods for a healthy retirement plan.

The factors that affect a fund manager’s performance don't need to be a mystery. Through an independent and sophisticated institutional measurement approach, you’ll be able to look at the individual elements of success that define superior investment manager skill. Our proprietary Scorecard System™ can help you improve outcomes, manage risk and reduce fiduciary exposure.

Using a custom benchmark index that explains a fund’s market-related and style-related investment returns, your analysis will show you unexplained variances that can be attributed to manager skill. We’re talking more than 40,000 funds on hundreds of provider products. Fueled by our institutional approach, your investment review incorporates:

• Modern portfolio theory statistics
• Quadratic optimization analysis
• Risk-adjusted return
• Fund style
• Peer group rankings
• Fund manager tenure
• The fund’s expense ratio relative to the average fund expense ratio in
• the asset class category
• The fund’s strength of statistics

Together, these factors let you measure the relative performance, characteristics, behavior and overall appropriateness of a fund as an investment option.

Working in a registered investment adviser capacity, we can act as either a 3(21) or 3(38) co-fiduciary to the retirement plan with respect to the selection and monitoring of investments. You’ll receive an investment policy statement, manager scorecard, quarterly market summaries and transition assistance whenever you need to terminate or hire a fund manager.

Improve productivity, job satisfaction and loyalty by boosting financial wellness.

Helping your employees maximize their financial security is a win-win. Employees who are stressed out about finances may be less productive and have a lower savings rate in retirement plans. You can help them reach their full retirement income potential through our customized workshops, one-on-one meetings, financial wellness programs and ongoing support.

Achieving Financial Wellness

Using behavioral economics, our financial wellness program engages and educates your employees. They’ll be motivated to take simple steps to reduce their debt, create budgets and begin to save more for retirement. By measuring the results of the program, we can help you continue to improve outcomes for the plan and your participants. The program focuses on:

• Budgeting
• Debt management
• Trust/wills
• Investments
• Life insurance
• College planning
• Retirement

Goal-setting workshops give your employees a chance to narrow in on what’s important to them and where they want to be financially. Once they know where they’re headed, our easy-to-use tools will help them figure out how to get there. A custom online dashboard lets them keep an eye on their progress and tweak their plans as needed to reach their financial goals.

Personalized Content

Every employee has different priorities and goals. You can choose from a variety of targeted presentations designed for all stages of careers and all phases of retirement planning. Employees can participate in live seminars or online training sessions in a group setting or meet with one of our professionals one-on-one. Employees whose first language isn't English can work with our bilingual education team either one-on-one or in a group.

Develop a well-reasoned metric to keep your plan competitive.

Do you know how much your retirement plan costs? ERISA requires that retirement plans must have reasonable plan expenses, but what does "reasonable" mean? The DOL doesn’t have specific benchmarks, but generally recommends that plans look at live bids from other providers every three to five years to see how the pricing stacks up. Through our exclusive tools and services, we can create a thorough market analysis so that you have a solid read on the current market.

B3 Provider Analysis™: Live Bid Benchmarking

Benchmarking can be a piece of cake with our proprietary B3 Provider Analysis, a leading live-bid benchmarking system. You’ll be able to compare the cost and quality of your current provider against the capabilities of other bidders. The comparisons you get are based on live provider RFP responses that take into account your plan’s complexity, parameters, investment lineup considerations and service requirements. The analysis compares 400+ data points in key areas, including record keeping, investment management, compliance services, employee education and technology.

Fees reviewed include:

• Investment management: A percentage of the assets invested and deducted from the return.
• Asset/wrap fee: These are additional fees layered on top of the total investment fees.
• 12b-1: Paid by mutual funds from fund assets for broker commissions, marketing, expenses and other administrative services.
• Shareholder servicing: Revenues shared by the mutual fund company with the service provider.
• Sub-TA: Sub-transfer agent fees for record keeping and other services.

B1 Fee Benchmarking Report™: Periodic Fee Benchmarking Against National Average

The DOL recommends taking retirement plans out to market every three to five years. Our B3 system has that covered. But what do you do between the full RFPs to ensure that your plan fees are reasonable? That’s where our B1 Fee Benchmarking Report comes in. This quick and simple, fee-only benchmarking report compares your plan’s fees against 105,000 other plans.

By using a combination of B3 and B1 reports over multiple years, you’re following a best practice in meeting fiduciary responsibilities under ERISA — which means your company and your employees will be positioned for success.

Seek compliance by asking the right questions about TDFs.

Concerned that plan sponsors weren’t looking into the assumptions and risks of their plans' target-date funds (TDFs) adequately, the DOL published tips in 2013. The bottom line? The DOL expects plan fiduciaries to go over a series of factors before selecting the glidepath that’s right for the plan. Through our TDF selection process, we’ll work with you to review the relevant factors for the right fit.

Once you’ve identified a "best-fit" glidepath, you’ll need a process in place to see if the quality, composition and fees of TDFs are right for your plan. Our TDF suitability process looks at plan-specific assumptions, participant demographics and participant tendencies to help with your evaluation.

We can also help you compare equity exposure, asset class exposure, management style, fund expenses and the quality of a TDF’s component funds. Whether you land on a traditional TDF or a custom solution, you’ll rest easier knowing you’ve got a solid process in place to find the right path for your participants.

A comprehensive retirement plan is an important benefit to attract employees and reduce tax costs.

At NFP, we understand the full scope of retirement plan administration and help small and midsize businesses design, implement and administer tailored retirement plans. 

We utilize our resources, experience and attention to detail to ensure your plan runs effectively and efficiently.

Our retirement services are supported by:

• Subject Matter Experts
• Tailored Service
• A Flexible Investment Platform
• An Annual Valuation Process
• An Extraordinary Breadth of Plan Designs
• Fiduciary Outsourcing Opportunities
• Regulatory Corrective Action Assistance

At NFP, we partner with you to design plan(s) tailored to your individual or organization’s culture, employment goals and financial objectives.