Products April 14, 2011

Pershing Offers Tips for Capturing Rollovers

Through a new Web site, www.retirementpowerplay.com, Pershing aims to help financial professionals grow their business by targeting “money in motion.”
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Pershing says the movement of retirement funds each year in the form of individual retirement account (IRA) rollovers, IRA transfers, and transfers of taxable money earmarked for retirement is estimated to be $303 billion. Retirementpowerplay.com was designed to give financial professionals actionable ideas, as well as tools and marketing materials, to engage clients based on specific retirement product needs.    

Pershing, a BNY Mellon company, created the site with the following features:

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  • Power Plays – Offers product-specific tips and techniques, tools and marketing resources for expanding retirement assets with IRAs, rollover IRAs, Roth IRA conversions and employer-sponsored plans.
  • Premium Content – Provides the latest retirement news headlines and articles from Dow Jones.
  • Retirement Tool Box – Provides product-specific marketing resources including educational content and thought leadership.
  • IndustryWatch – Keeps users up-to-date on the latest developments affecting the retirement marketplace.
  • Retirement Calculators – Provides valuable tools for comparing IRAs, calculating required minimum distributions, performing Roth conversion analyses, and evaluating other critical retirement decisions.
  • Best Practices Blog – Helps financial professionals share best practices, exchange ideas, and capture actionable tips for building their retirement businesses.
Compliance April 14, 2011

ERIC Suggests Ways to Reduce Regulatory Burden

The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) submitted comments to the Department of Labor (DoL) in response to a Request for Information (RFI) on ways the Department could reduce the burden associated with its regulations.
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In its letter, ERIC said: “As federal regulations become more complex and pervasive, ERIC’s members spend a larger and larger portion of their available time, effort, and financial resources complying with federal requirements.  ERIC’s members believe that these resources often would be better spent preserving and enhancing workers’ benefits.”  

ERIC also contended that much could be gained if large employers, and others key stakeholders, were engaged on an ongoing basis in the Department’s regulatory review process, and recommended that a group representing key stakeholders be constituted to meet on a regular basis to review regulations that have been published during the previous period.  

Specifically, ERIC suggested the DoL: 

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  • Permit electronic disclosure without affirmative consent, saying that it is not practical for large employers to obtain, store, and administer electronic consents from tens of thousands of workers, retirees, alternate payees, COBRA beneficiaries, and other individuals, and that DoL’s restrictions make electronic disclosure effectively unavailable to large employers; 
  • Clarify that most employee assistance programs are not group health plans, noting that the Department has never provided formal guidance concerning the status of these programs, but has issued advisory opinions indicating that the programs will be treated as group health plans if they offer limited counseling benefits; 
  • Resolve the conflict between the fee disclosure requirement for participant-directed plans and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s summary prospectus requirement, noting that it is confusing for plan participants and burdensome for plan administrators to disclose operating expenses in two different ways for the same funds; 
  • Increase Form 5500 reporting thresholds for non-monetary compensation (Instructions for Form 5500 Schedule C), saying that the burden of collecting and reporting information for business meals and other incidental forms of non-monetary compensation far exceeds any possible benefit associated with the reporting requirements; and 
  • Coordinate regulations affecting workplace wellness programs under Title I and II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), noting that employers are reluctant to invest additional time and money in developing wellness programs until the applicable law is clarified, and gives effect to the intent of Congress and the Administration to support workplace wellness programs.

ERIC’s letter is here.

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