15th Anniversary of RPAY: Atlanta Retirement Partners

While aggregators keep expanding, Atlanta Retirement Partners continues to enjoy being a specialty practice.

David Griffin

Since being named the 2019 PLANSPONSOR Small Team Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year, Atlanta Retirement Partners has hired an additional staff member from a third-party administrator (TPA). Shawn Slemons is now a client relationship manager at the firm, says David Griffin, founder of the practice and director of institutional retirement plans.

“I hired Shawn, my favorite TPA guru, to add TPA expertise, and he has been a great differentiator for us,” Griffin says.

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Atlanta Retirement Partners, located in Georgia’s capital city, has always specialized in governmental plans, and, in the past year, it has added two such clients, he notes.

“Our service model has changed in the past two years a bit in that as we continue to add customers, it has created a bit of a time crunch for me personally,” Griffin says. “I have always enjoyed working with plan participants, but with 135 institutional customers now, it has become hard for me to work with individual participants, so I have delegated that work to our service team, while I concentrate on large presentations and onboarding clients.”

Griffin says the industry has changed considerably in the past 10 years. “I have been at the helm of this firm for the past eight years since we rebranded as Atlanta, and in this time, there has been so much consolidation and so much more specialization by retirement plan practices. Clearly, we have seen the hobbyist retirement plan adviser producers become less interested in the area due to increasing liabilities and fee compression. We have seen benefits brokers and these hobbyists leave the business, enabling practices such as mine to take over their small books of business. At the same time, aggregators are having a dominant impact on our industry in that they can leverage technology and reduce expenses. At the end of the day, these trends have allowed specialty firms like ours to thrive and serve more organizations.”

Griffin says he is very optimistic about the future of the retirement plan industry. “I am a big believer in an ‘abundance mentality,’ always have been,” he says. “I have always been friends with my competitors in this market. There is an opportunity for us all to have a nice piece of the pie. Like any business, we have risks, the biggest being legislative risk. What we do have control over is the type of customers we look to attract and retain, and how we charge for our services and disclose our fees. As long as we continue to move the needle on plan design and retirement readiness, there is plenty of opportunity for us to continue to grow.”

Griffin says he has witnessed a growing acceptance among plan sponsors for holistic financial wellness. “There has been a tremendous convergence of health and wealth and human resources [HR] professionals looking to have a single benefits solution,” he says. “As demand for this type of service rises, this has led to further consolidation of our business. At the end of the day, this consolidation can benefit plan participants, and that will continue to exist.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the beginning of last year, Atlanta Retirement Partners was already prepared to work virtually, as Griffin founded his practice on that principle. “Eight years ago, when I founded Atlanta Retirement Partners, I was very budget conscious and decided on a cloud-based service model with our team members working from home, and that has served me well, even before the advent of COVID-19.”

In fact, in 2020, the practice experienced significant growth, attracting more than 20 new customers, Griffin notes. “I am very pleased with how things went for us last year,” he says. “Our cloud-based approach gave us a head start, though we are now using more videos than before.”

Griffin also says the conversations the firm was having with clients shifted in the past year.

“The real change in our conversations in the past year has been in regard to the CARES [Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security] Act,” Griffin says. “When it was first enacted, there was a lot of confusion in the marketplace. Participants thought they should take money out of their retirement plans and invest in somewhere else, so we provided a lot of education for them on staying the course and the value of dollar-cost averaging. For sponsors, we had many conversations about enacting parts of the CARES Act. A lot of recordkeepers were doing negative consent, so we had to carefully monitor that and communicate the terms to our sponsor clients. Forty percent of our sponsors decided to permit CARES distributions for their participants—but we put guardrails in place requiring these participants to have a conversation with us first before taking out the loan or hardship withdrawal. That succeeded in acting as a stop-gap measure and convinced many participants to keep their money in their plans. It created some work for us, but that work was necessary, and our clients were appreciative of our efforts at the end of the day.”

As to what retirement plan advisers can do to improve defined contribution (DC) plans and participants’ outcomes, Griffin says, “It sounds very simple, but it comes down to having the right conversations with decisionmakers and helping them care about their qualified plans. We want to work with clients who truly care about their participants. They are the best clients. When you can have those deep, strategic planning conversations on plan design and education, your customers look at you as a real partner in working to have a meaningful impact on plan participants. That is what I love about the business.”

Advisers Should Define Their Digital Strategy

A Broadridge webinar evaluated the impacts of successful virtual advising in 2020, and explored which digital outlets financial advisers are focusing on in 2021.


When COVID-19 hit the financial services industry last March, many advisers turned to digital mediums to reach their clients and, along the way, realized the lasting impact virtual outreach could have on their clients and the future of their firms.

“We saw that this last year, some financial advisers thought about how they need to poise themselves for growth given the new rules of the game,” said Kevin Darlington, general manager of Broadridge Advisor Solutions, during a recent summit held by the firm. “We see a lot of advisers who really thrived, and, in 2021, those are the advisers who are going to be pulling away even further.”

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A recent Broadridge study of 600 financial advisers found that because of the impacts of COVID-19, more advisers believe the quality of technology, digital marketing and content marketing is more important than ever. Study findings showed growth-focused advisers are more likely to thrive than those who did not take advantage of new tech.

The second-annual study found goal-oriented advisers were two times more likely to generate clients annually. This group of advisers is also two times more likely to have a defined digital marketing strategy. “A digital marketing strategy doesn’t necessarily need to be complex. It’s having a set of concrete, measurable goals, and then measuring against those goals and optimizing,” Darlington said.

During the webinar, Bill Cates, a relationship marketing expert with Referral Coach International, underscored the importance of virtual outreach and personalized communications. “The goal is to make sure you sharpen your message, so it hits the part of their brain that is relevant to them,” he explained.

The study found most financial advisers are investing in search engine marketing, webinars, audio and short-form video content and advertising in digital media. Short-form video content, Darlington mentioned, was the top area financial advisers are looking to invest in this year, given an increase in demand among all client demographics.

Which social media channels financial advisers use will determine how long a video should be. While a video on Facebook may average two or three minutes, financial advisers can make their content as long as 10 minutes on YouTube. More recent video-sharing platforms, such as TikTok, will only give financial advisers a minute or less to explain their content.

“People’s attention spans are getting smaller, and it’s because of how fast we’re scrolling through feeds,” Darlington said.

For financial advisers who are looking to improve their digital engagement efforts, Darlington suggested they start by reviewing standard compliance recommendations, especially for those who work with small businesses. “We know small business employers are going to be challenged with how they can continuously grow their business,” he says. “In a regulated industry like wealth management, that is going to be trickier. Just like how you would, say, consult your doctor, consult your compliance department.”

Other actionable steps to improve digital marketing and outreach include defining the company’s target audience as well as organizing marketing initiatives for the year, Darlington concluded.

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