October 12, 2017

2014 RPAY – Ellen R. Lander

Reported by

PA: What is your mission statement?

Ellen R. Lander: To help retirement plan sponsors meet and manage their fiduciary responsibilities under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and, in doing so, provide the foundation for their employees to become better prepared for retirement.

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PA: How is your team/process/structure unique?

ERL: Renaissance Benefit Advisors prides itself on conducting independent research and providing proprietary reports that fully recognize each of our clients’ unique needs and objectives.

Given the complexity of our industry and the “prudent expert” standard to which plan fiduciaries are held, our goal is to present relevant information in a way that prompts committees to engage in deliberative debate and discussion. The result is fully informed decisionmaking that presents the right solution for their employees and organization.

PA: What have you done in the past year to improve participants’ retirement readiness?

ERL: As the majority of our clients are referred to us by other clients, our practice tends to be focused on certain industries and organizational structures. One of the commonalities among our clients’ plans is a generous company contribution, usually in the form of a large match. As participation tends not to be an issue, our efforts to improve retirement readiness are focused on a combination of automatic escalation of employee contributions, restructuring fund menus to help optimize investment decisionmaking—such as removing redundant choices and structuring tiered menus—defaulting employees into a carefully monitored target-date fund (TDF) and bringing investment costs down.

We also recommend that our clients work with providers whose employee communications and educational materials focus on retirement readiness and have tools in place to make it easy for participants to act.

PA: How have you been able to lower fees for clients?

ERL: We’ve had a lot of success in getting our clients’ fees lowered. As we work with retirement plans on a full-time basis, we have a pretty good sense for where a plan’s fees should be. If we believe our client’s fees are too high, we embark upon a process of: a) removing services—and their related cost—that are not needed or aren’t being delivered; b) negotiating with the service provider to re-price the plan given its current size and service needs; and c) replacing investment funds or share classes to align the indirect fees with the required revenue.

We benchmark our clients’ fees every year and are constantly negotiating with the service providers to recognize growth in assets and average account balances with reduced fees. We enjoy strong and trusting relationships with the service providers we work with, and almost without exception, they are very willing to do what’s needed.

PA: Describe any particularly noteworthy investment initiatives you have led with your customer base in the past 12 months.

ERL: An increasing focus over the past 12 months has been to work with our clients on re-evaluating their choice of target-date fund. Why did they select the TDF they have? Does it represent the best solution for their employees based on demographics? Is it philosophically aligned with the organization’s goals?

As we know, evaluating TDFs is quite complex. As they’re designed to pursue a long-term investment strategy, their performance versus a capital market benchmark may not address their “competitiveness” or whether the TDF is suitable for the plan and employees’ needs. Plan participants who invest in the TDF are entrusting the plan sponsor to determine an appropriate investment solution. We want to make sure that we continue to deserve that trust.

PA: As a retirement plan adviser, what do you take the most pride in?

ERL: Working with clients who truly care—plan sponsors who are willing to take the necessary steps to help their employees achieve a comfortable and dignified retirement. In the end, that’s what it’s all about.

BUSINESS AT A GLANCE

Plan assets under advisement: $1.4 billion

Median plan size (in assets): $38 million

Total plans under advisement: 21

Total participants in plans served: 16,790
October 12, 2017

2014 RPAY – Joe Connell

Reported by

PA: What have you done in the past year to improve participants’ retirement readiness?

Joe Connell: When we work with our clients, our process begins with a review of all previous communications and employee education meetings. We analyze what has been successful in the past and what has not worked for an organization. Then we build a five- to six-question survey to ask employees how they would like to receive communications and topics that interested them. A small raffle prize gets response rates to exceed 75%.

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We review this information with the employer, and we devise a customized approach to begin delivering a new employee education and communication program. We document our baseline for our goals and establish a target for our objectives, then implement the new strategy. After six months, we review the progress and tweak anything we may need to adjust, and then we continue for the next six months.

By developing education programs that are targeted to different demographic groups and created to meet specific employee requests—and that will also allow for changes as needed at the six-month mark—we have been successful in helping our clients to better prepare their participants for retirement and improve the overall health of their plans. A typical new client with retirement readiness percentages in the low 40% area will see a retirement-readiness improvement of more than 25% in the first year of the program.

PA: Describe any particularly noteworthy investment initiatives you have led with your customer base in the past 12 months.

JC: Our goal when working with our new clients in 2013 was to accomplish better diversification with fewer funds in most of the plan menus we inherited with our new clients. The typical fund menu we saw was using 30 to 32 funds. We have effectively used overlap analysis and correlation measurements to eliminate the use of unnecessary additional asset classes in many of our new plan clients. This has allowed us to better focus our education efforts in our employee meetings on proper asset allocation or using a managed account—and to not spend as much time trying to explain how to use many of the sector-specific funds in an appropriate manner to employees who may have invested in just one or two of those options.

Our investment committee’s review process is also shorter, and we feel we can add an asset class much more easily if we have streamlined our fund menu back down to 17 to 19 investment options.

PA: As a retirement plan adviser, what do you take the most pride in?

JC: Our role as a 401(k) plan adviser is a truly specialized one. Being a 401(k) plan adviser is about the participants and their beneficiaries. All of our decisions need to be based on that simple premise. We want our services to be measured in how we are able to help an organization’s employees reach their retirement dreams. Being able to work with employees over the course of many years, to be able to see those employees retire and have them thank you for helping them reach their retirement goals, provides us with all the incentive we need to stay passionate and motivated to help as many participants as we can. Those personal experiences with an organization’s employees are how we measure the success of our partnership with our plan sponsor clients, and it gives us a tremendous source of pride.

BUSINESS AT A GLANCE

Plan assets under advisement: $459 million

Median plan size (in assets): $17 million

Total plans under advisement: 27

Total participants in plans served: 8,250

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