HUB Retirement and Private Wealth

Francisco Abril and Joseph DeNoyior

Business at a Glance

PLANADVISER: What differentiates your team in a crowded advisory marketplace today? Please expand on what you do differently in practice, not philosophy.

HUB RPW: HUB RPW’s service model is built around genuine availability and depth of expertise, not the appearance of it. Joe DeNoyior leads a team that conducts in-person committee meetings quarterly and offers both group education and one-on-one employee sessions as needed. Every adviser on the team brings specific subject matter depth, and clients interact with that expertise directly, not through layers of account management.

Francisco Abril, vice president of employee engagement and financial wellness, extends that model to the employee level. His work focuses on helping employees across the income spectrum understand and act on their benefits—retirement, health and ancillary—as a connected whole, rather than a series of disconnected products. That integration of financial wellness into the plan advisory relationship is not common at this scale, and it reflects a deliberate team-building decision, not an add-on service.

The team’s retention average of 10 years speaks to what that model produces in practice.

PLANADVISER: How are regulation, technology, or market volatility changing the way you advise plans and participants? What adjustments have you made in response?

HUB RPW: The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 has meaningfully expanded the advisory conversation. Provisions related to automatic enrollment, long-term, part-time employee eligibility, emergency savings, and catch-up contribution changes have created both compliance obligations and employee education opportunities. The team has built those topics directly into committee meeting agendas and employee communication calendars, rather than treating them as one-time updates.

On the technology side, the practice has invested in tools that reduce friction for plan sponsors: streamlined reporting, digital employee touchpoints and CRM-supported follow-through on open items. The goal is not technology for its own sake, but removing the administrative drag that distracts committees from fiduciary priorities.

Market volatility has reinforced the team’s focus on employee behavior over account balances. When markets move sharply, the most important work is often keeping employees from making decisions that lock in losses. That requires consistent, plain-language communication well before a downturn, so employees already have context when conditions change.

PLANADVISER: Why does broadening the talent pipeline in retirement plan advising matter to the industry’s future? What risks do you see if it doesn’t happen?

HUB RPW: The retirement plan advisory profession handles financial decisions that affect tens of millions of workers, many of them hourly, many of them first-generation savers, many of them from communities that have historically had limited access to professional financial guidance. If the advisers serving those employees don’t reflect the diversity of the employees themselves, there’s a real cost: in trust, in communication effectiveness and in the questions that don’t get asked because the room isn’t diverse enough to ask them.

The pipeline risk is compounding. Many of the industry’s most experienced advisers are approaching retirement, and the profession hasn’t done enough to build the next generation, particularly among women and advisers of color. If that doesn’t change, advisory practices will consolidate further, plan sponsors will have fewer meaningful choices, and employees in smaller or underserved markets will lose access to quality guidance altogether.

Joe DeNoyior has spent 34 years building the opposite case: that sharing access, sharing clients and sharing revenue with developing advisers creates a healthier profession and more sustainable practices. His tenure as past president of both the American Retirement Association and the National Association of Plan Advisors gave him the platform to advocate for that view at scale, and he’s used it.

PLANADVISER: What concrete steps has your firm taken to attract, develop, or retain next-generation or underrepresented talent? What has worked—and what hasn’t?

HUB RPW: The most concrete thing Joe DeNoyior does is also the least common: He brings developing advisers into live client relationships as co-advisers, sharing both the work and the revenue. This isn’t a training program with a graduation date; it’s an immediate, real-world introduction to plan advisory work at a level most newcomers never see until much later in their careers. Several advisers who launched or substantially grew their practices have done so through this model.

The RPW Mentor Program formalizes a version of this at the team level. It pairs team members across functions, provides career development support and creates networking opportunities within the broader HUB RPW organization. The program has been most effective for staff who already have a clear sense of where they want to go; it works less well as a general orientation tool, which has pushed the team toward more targeted matching.

Francisco Abril’s role as vice president of employee engagement and financial wellness represents a structural commitment to broadening the talent profile of the team. His background and focus on underserved employee populations bring a perspective that shapes how the team communicates, what services it prioritizes and who it hires. HUB International’s Culture & Belonging infrastructure, including the HUB Women Network, Black Inclusion Network, Hispanic Network and others, provides the organizational framework. What the team has learned is that programs matter less than behavior: The most effective development happens when senior advisers treat access as something to distribute, not protect.