Client Service April 1, 2016

Holistic Wellness Remains a Hot Topic Among Employers

From managing stress to improving resiliency, companies are finding new ways to assist with their employees’ financial challenges.
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More employers are investing in “total well-being” programs that address areas such as financial and emotional health, according to the 7th annual survey about corporate Health & Well-being from Fidelity Investments and the National Business Group on Health.

The survey revealed employers are adding programs that help employees manage stress, improve their resiliency and assist with their financial challenges.

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This year’s survey results indicate employers recognize a “healthy” employee may be affected negatively by non-health factors and are including programs to address emotional and financial needs rather than focusing solely on physical health. In 2016, 87% of employers offer emotional or mental well-being programs and 76% provide financial health programs. When employers were asked about well-being programs in the future, 67% plan to expand their efforts, and an additional 17% plan to maintain at the current level.

“Employers have long understood the importance of improving employee productivity, and are now focused on the factors that impact productivity, specifically, drivers of well-being, such as emotional stress and financial challenges to achieve their goals,” says Adam Stavisky, senior vice president, Fidelity Benefits Consulting.

NEXT: Wellness program components and incentives

Stress management is by far the most popular emotional well-being program offered—54% of employers currently offer this program, and an additional 12% are planning to do so in 2017. Also popular is resiliency training, which helps employees manage setbacks in the workplace or in life outside work—27% of employers offer this program, with another 20% planning to do so in 2017.

To help employees manage their financial well-being, nearly three-quarters (73%) of companies surveyed offer on-site financial seminars, and 59% make a financial coach available to employees. Student loan repayment assistance—a benefit typically only offered in the public sector—will now be offered by 13% of employers in 2016, and another 21% are considering adding it in the future.

In 2015, 81% of employees received at least some amount of incentives, up from 73% in 2014. The percent of employees receiving incentives steadily increased as employers expand well-being programs to appeal to additional elements of overall well-being, as well as provide employees with more ways to earn incentives. At the same time, as employers expand into new areas, they are moving away from
Deals & People April 1, 2016

Retirement Industry People Moves

PNC Asset Management moves ahead on CIO transition; Morningstar acquires RightPond analytics capabilities from Rocaton Investment Advisors. 
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PNC Asset Management Group Enacts CIO Transition

PNC Asset Management Group named Thomas Melcher as the company’s new chief investment officer back in January, but he is now beginning to take on full responsibility for the role with the pending retirement of James Dunigan.

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The firm explains that Melcher and Dunigan have been working closely through first quarter to prepare for the full transition of responsibilities.

Orlando Esposito, head of the PNC Asset Management Group, says Melcher “will build on Jim’s legacy of outstanding service. He brings a strong appreciation of our clients’ needs, as well as 20-plus years of investments experience, to the role.”

Dunigan joined PNC predecessor Provident National Bank as a portfolio manager in the Trust & Investment Management Division in 1987. Over nearly three decades with the company, he held various management and investment leadership roles, and today chairs PNC’s Investment Policy Committee and Administrative Committee with oversight of the pension and 401(k) plans.

Melcher joined PNC in 1991 as a credit analyst, advancing through a number of roles including chief investment officer for PNC Wealth Management in Philadelphia and southern New Jersey. He was named managing executive of Hawthorn in 2004 and has since grown the practice into one of the nation’s largest ultra-high net worth wealth management firms.

The firm also announced that Nicole Perkins, market director of fiduciary services for Hawthorn’s Philadelphia and Delaware markets, is succeeding Melcher to lead Hawthorn. Prior to joining PNC in 2011, she ran her own private legal practice, where she counseled families and the owners of family-owned businesses in connection with wealth preservation, multigenerational planning, business succession planning and charitable planning. She previously practiced as a trust and estate associate at Morgan Lewis LLP and Duane Morris.

For information about PNC, visit www.pnc.com.

NEXT: Morningstar Acquires RightPond 

 

Morningstar Acquires RightPond

Morningstar Inc. announced the acquisition of RequiSight, LLC, which does business under the RightPond brand and provides business intelligence data and analytics on defined contribution and defined benefit plans for financial services firms.

Morningstar acquired RightPond from Rocaton Investment Advisors, LLC, an institutional investment advisor in Norwalk, Connecticut.

RightPond specializes in business intelligence and analytics capabilities that “reveal gaps, trends, outliers, and risk signals regarding plan performance, fees, capital flow, gatekeeper relationships, and best practices of defined contribution (DC) and defined benefit (DB) plans.”

The company services many types of benefits plans, including corporate DC and DB retirement plans, pensions, 403(b)s; health and welfare plans; public pension funds; foundations; endowments; and other institutional investors.

Scott Burns, head of asset management solutions for Morningstar, says RightPond has a “distinct data set and powerful analytics that give institutional investors and advisers a unique way to gather data on where investors in retirement plans are investing their money. By combining RightPond’s business intelligence retirement data and analytics with Morningstar’s performance and other investment strategy attribute data, we’re creating a more complete view of the investment landscape to connect investors with advisers, consultants, and asset managers.”

Morningstar will continue to offer RightPond as a standalone capability until it is integrated into Morningstar Data and Morningstar Direct, the company’s cloud-based investment analysis platform for institutions and advisers. Eventually, the company will rebrand RightPond under the Morningstar name.

RightPond, based in Westport, Connecticut, was first developed in 2012 by Rocaton as a benchmarking tool to help its institutional investors become more efficient at setting strategy and measuring risk. The development team included two data scientists with backgrounds from IBM Research who tackled the daunting task of harnessing massive sets of structured and unstructured data. The company created a data extraction, normalization, and analytics platform and commercialized it in early 2014 as RightPond.

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