National Practices, Local Advisers

As more retirement advisers near their own retirements and succession planning becomes top of mind, a growing number of firms are adopting a mode that includes both a national office, sometimes referred to as a “home office,” and advisers working closer to their clients. This approach varies from firm to firm, but typically allows for the “home office” to act as a centralized headquarters that may dole out investment research, portfolio oversight, compliance reviews and more, while advisers based at regional offices or in local communities manage specific plan designs and participant education.

This is no one-size-fits-all model, but according to firms that have embraced it, the key is finding the right balance.

Allow for Autonomy

At Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC, regional teams have “producers” responsible for growing a book of business, bringing in revenue and managing a team that will support various clients. Regional offices also have consultants and associate consultants, all of whom are supported by a national support team to varying degrees. For example, in recent years, MMA hired chief content and marketing officers to provide thought leadership content and coordinated marketing initiatives that can be shared across the firm’s more than 30 offices, in addition to a chief sales officer who helps emerging producers build their book of business.

But even though there is a support team that allows some uniformity across the regional offices, the regional offices are encouraged to be autonomous. The central support team hosts periodic calls to provide updates, share success stories across regions and promote best practice sharing and collaboration. It worked with regional office leadership to structure a national investment due diligence committee, headed by the firm’s chief investment officer and composed of chartered financial analysts from across the regional teams.

While the national investment committee establishes the guidance for MMA’s fund monitoring criteria; offers guidance on buy lists; and produces deeper due diligence on investment options like target-date, retirement income and stable-value funds, consultants at each regional office are also supported by their own regional investment committee, allowing for flexibility. Regional offices have their own committees that hold quarterly meetings with consultants and peers in that region, then discuss those trends with peers at the national level.

“It allows the regional investment committees to provide feedback and bring ideas or thoughts on strategy or maybe a different perspective that needs to be entertained by the national investment committee,” says Lisa Buffington, senior vice president of retirement services for MMA’s Northeast region. “It’s really important for the regional offices to be a little bit autonomous. You have to stay within the guidelines set out by the national investment due diligence committee, but at the regional level, you can have a dialogue about things that are going on in your regional book of business and we get to make decisions that make sense for our book.”

Embrace Flexibility

At CBIZ Inc., the central office has an education-focused team called “Focused, Inspired, Transformed (FIT)” that creates guidelines for the education provided to participants—and yet the ability for participants to be more engaged if they want to be is key, says according to CBIZ Chief Investment Officer Jennifer Hutchins. Plans can add one-off services for participant engagement, such as point-in-time investment advice in which participants can reach out to the FIT team members for a virtual or in-person meeting to get all their questions answered.

“Flexibility is the name of the game for us,” Hutchins says, adding that the FIT team is based spread out around the country because they want to be hands-on and be able to meet participants in person. “It’’s centralized, if you will, and managed at the home office level, but we have boots on the ground throughout the U.S.”

As OneDigital (Digital Insurance LLC) considers centralizing aspects of its retirement business such as investment monitoring reports and other client plan review materials, National Vice President of Retirement Solutions Frank Zugaro says the firm wants to make sure it leaves room for customization in the field.

Zugaro says many of the advisers who have come to OneDigital through acquisition have a very strong entrepreneurial spirit.

“We don’t want to squash that spirit,” he says.

Drive Efficiency, Uniformity

At MMA, the central support team issues ongoing communications, including periodic updates on off-the-shelf solutions, marketing updates, a regulatory update from the ERISA team and a monthly plan sponsor newsletter.

“The benefits are efficiency, compliance and uniformity. It keeps everyone working from similar materials and content, so it’s much better from a compliance standpoint while being representative of collective best practices,” Buffington says. When she first joined the firm, staff in the regional offices were putting together content “off the side of their desks.” “It took forever and might not always represent the absolute most evolved thinking.”

Now they have people dedicated to content in the central support team—who still prioritize ideas coming out of the regional offices—and it’s led to stronger content, she adds.

OneDigital has centralized some of its compliance and education support, including a pitch deck, a client plan review template and some fiduciary education for its clients. That way its advisers don’t have to spend time creating and distributing those documents themselves, and when you have around 50 offices across the country with retirement businesses, getting on the same page with the look and feel of your content is important, Zugaro says. The firm has also centralized the construction, maintenance and enhancement of its customer relationship management system so that it’s easier for clients and advisers to meet with clients and prospects everyday.

“That’s a massive amount of operational efficiency that the offices can gain when they plug into it,”  Zugaro adds.

Product Innovation and Relationship Management

Another benefit of the centralized structure is the potential for innovation. At MMA, some product innovations arise from partnerships with providers, such as integrating the firm’s financial wellness tools, establishing pooled employer plans and ensuring dedicated provider service teams that align to MMA’s national practice and regional retirement teams. These innovations begin at and are managed from the national level, but regional teams adapt them for the regional market.

Having the home office manage partnerships and relationships can also help with scaling. Hutchins describes CBIZ as “recordkeeper agnostic”: They have a list of preferred recordkeepers, but want to be flexible to accommodate plan sponsor and client preferences. The central office manages the relationships with recordkeepers, which is beneficial because centralized managers can see all assets managed with those recordkeepers and negotiate, as well as curate lists of investments to the advantage of plan sponsors and participants, Hutchins says. That is more efficiently done on a national level than the regional level, where one plan could be working with Fidelity, another with Principal and another with Empower.

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