Want the latest retirement plan adviser news and insights? Sign up for PLANADVISER newsletters.
Client Service December 2, 2024
Moving Beyond SECURE 2.0
Retirement plan advisers discuss how they’re wrapping up 2024 with clients and preparing for the year ahead.
Reported by Alex Ortolani
Art by Ryan Davis
Chuck Williams, founder, CEO and senior consultant at Finspire LLC, says he and his team are finally in a position to stop focusing on provisions from the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 in favor of more personalized plan services.
“We spent a lot of time on SECURE 2.0 this year with the goal of putting that behind us so we can stop talking about it,” Williams says.
Finspire may be rare among advisories in being ready to move beyond SECURE 2.0. But it is not different in its plans to work closely with clients on the year ahead, with focus areas ranging from firming up retirement plan committee procedures and processes to discussing the market implications of this year’s elections to considering trending areas of plan litigation against which clients must guard.
No matter what 2025 brings, it’s clear it will be a busy one for advisers, as they navigate numerous and shifting demands from clients, courts, regulators and policymakers.
Improving Efficiency
Williams, of Finspire, says his team worked with clients to “really tackle SECURE 2.0” in 2024 to set up any mandatory provisions, such as the higher-earner Roth catch-up contributions that start in January 2026. That work led to Finspire focusing on one of two areas with clients in Q4, depending on their needs: improving retirement plan committee efficiencies or diving deep into employee outcomes.
To improve efficiency, the team might consider the retirement plan committee structure, timing and impact of meetings, or consider whether the sponsor should leverage a 3(16) or 3(38) fiduciary structure. This area has been particularly important for businesses going through mergers and acquisitions, says Williams, as that was a more common occurrence in 2024.
If a client wants to focus on its participants, Williams says Finspire will dive into the data to consider what is working and what isn’t. Those findings may lead to discussions about ancillary savings plans, retirement income options or financial wellness programs.
“We do an analysis of where they are today to see if the data tell us something is broken or can be improved,” Williams says. “We’re looking at the overall health of the plan, the participant rate and seeing if it aligns with your culture and goals.”
3 Prongs
Joe DeBello, a vice president and financial adviser at CAPTRUST, sees three key themes for clients as 2024 comes to close.
The first are questions and conversations arising from the U.S. presidential and congressional elections and what the results mean for the broader economy and investing. Those conversations may include what inflation would mean for participants in the plan or how a recession, rather than an economic soft landing, would impact them.
“More often, in these types of years [with major elections], there are a lot more questions about policy, the economy and what the future may hold from a markets perspective,” DeBello says.
A second area DeBello sees as a focus, at least for some plan sponsors, is the start of implementing optional SECURE 2.0 provisions such, as the student loan matching benefit or in-plan income options.
“We have gotten beyond the feeling-out phase of what is coming, and we’re starting to see real-world examples of employers implementing some of the optional provisions,” he says.
Finally, DeBello believes 2024 brought an even greater focus on governance and fiduciary issues. This focus comes, in part, as lawsuits continue about the use of plan forfeitures and decisions on plan default settings.
“As students of the game, so to speak, we take the approach that the best defense is a good offense,” DeBello says. “Whether right or wrong, warranted or unwarranted, we want our clients to always be following best practices and visiting and revisiting policies and procedures.”
Benefits to Wealth
Christian Mango, the national practice leader for the Alera Group’s retirement plan services division, said he believes 2025 will see continued merging of employee benefits and wealth management for individuals.
“The plan sponsors don’t want to be hearing from separate lines of business anymore,” Mango says. “They want to hear from us as one voice so they are getting services in a unified way.”
Mango says some of this connection will come from strong benefits programs that include an engaging and impactful financial wellness program for participants. He notes that some programs have a bad reputation in the market for not producing better outcomes, but some are working well to get participants the tools and services they need.
In November, Alera announced its own financial services offering in partnership with TIFIN @Work, called FinWell Connect, which uses artificial intelligence in its workplace benefits and wealth management services.
Mango says another theme of 2025 will be retirement and benefits partnerships, as firms look to leverage scale and expertise in mutually beneficial ways. He believes the fee compression that has affected everyone from recordkeepers to advisers to asset managers may risk eroding services, and partnerships such as Alera’s with TIFIN @Work will help create better solutions.
“We’ve done this [fee compression] to ourselves, largely,” he says. “We have to stop. We have to really show what our value is to the plan sponsor clients. … When you look at a good client service model, it’s so important for those participants on a daily basis, a quarterly basis—and we need to make sure that we are telling that story to the client and to the market as a whole.”
