Retirement industry aggregators have kept growing at a rapid rate in recent years despite headwinds ranging from the global pandemic to rising interest rates and longstanding recession fears.

Hub International’s retirement and private wealth division has been one of the key movers in that group. The division, part of Hub’s $3.7 billion insurance brokerage and employee benefits practice, booked 10 deals in 2023. Those included a December acquisition of high-profile retirement and wealth advisory AFS, including founder and principal Alp Atabek and principal Alex Assaley.

For Joe DeNoyior, Hub’s president of retirement and private wealth, 2024 is slated to be a year when a lot of that work comes to fruition, both operationally and in terms of client services.

In this PLANADVISER Interview, DeNoyior discusses the need for the retirement industry to move beyond just automatic features in retirement plans; a national program of financial coaching that can be referred to local wealth managers; and the AFS deal. The conversation has been excerpted for length.

PLANADVISER: What are some of your key strategic objectives for 2024?

DENOYIOR: From a strategic point, 2024 for us is the year it all comes together—meaning we apply scale.

Not only Hub, but a lot of our peers have spent the last several years bringing in great offices through acquisition and building out the services and tools and resources. I feel like we’ve done a very good job of bringing in great firms.

Now we’re focused on continued enhancements to the deliverables to our advisers and clients. Whenever you’’re in this process of acquiring a firm, you make promises, right? 2024 is where we deliver on the promises.

We have been [delivering on promises] along the way. But frankly, a lot of time has been spent on bringing firms in and making them part of the family. Now we have this great opportunity to continue to enhance everything we’re doing in the marketplace. In order to do that, we’ve taken a ton of feedback from all our offices in terms of where we think the ball is going and how we want to participate in those areas.

PLANADVISER: Can you talk about what that will mean for clients?

DENOYIOR: From a client standpoint, it’s a big year for us.

In the retirement industry, mainly through auto features, we’ve all done a pretty good job in getting some of the basic numbers up. We’ve gotten enrollment rates up; we’ve been driving savings rates up. We would love to say all of that has been happening through education, but really, it’s all through plan design. Let’s call it what it is.

What we continue to focus on now is driving higher engagement rates for the employees we serve. Meaning that we get them in the plan, and they’re saving a pretty good amount, but now we want to get them even further connected with their employer. We’re working to really help our clients take a much more holistic view of their overall benefits strategy and making sure we’re helping them determine what’s aligned with the needs of the employees.

Being part of a big employee benefit shop gives us a totally different angle on how we look at benefits strategy. Most of the retirement folks in the past have looked through the lens of the retirement consulting firm and asked: “How can we help you make your retirement plan better?” Our conversations are getting much more broad.

Now we’re saying: “Let’s take a look at your workforce and help you analyze the needs of that workforce and see where we can help you deliver.” What we’re finding is that a lot of that messaging is going through our retirement shops, because obviously we have a tight connection with the employers.

PLANADVISER: Many of your acquisitions last year were on the wealth management side of the aisle. How is the rubber hitting the road in terms of connecting that to your retirement plan business?

DENOYIOR: We actually divide things up into retail and wealth. We all [in the industry] call it wealth management in general. But it’s not all wealth management. Some people don’t need a full financial plan. Some people need guidance on specific accounts or they need guidance on how to save for college.

We view wealth management as a little bit more holistic of a planning process where people are actually building wealth or protecting wealth—whatever the case may be—but they’re building a plan around it. What we’ve spent the last year doing is serving all these employees, so we don’t have to say, “Oh, you don’t have enough money.” We don’t turn anyone away.

One of our acquisitions several years ago was focused on serving, in my mind, an underserved population, which is school districts. They had built out a telehealth service where you have a call center and call in and get all sorts of basic [financial] coaching questions answered.

What we’ve spent the last three-quarters [of 2023] on and are really excited to roll out throughout ’24 is having that centralized coaching for all of our clients. If an employee needs additional assistance beyond the coaching, or they have something more than, say, a $42,000 rollover, they can get sent to one of our local wealth management offices. That’s how we’ve mapped it all out, and we’ve been doing that region by region.

It has worked pretty well, because those that need help but don’t have access to a wealth management adviser still have access to a coach, and they get the assistance they need.

We’re not building anything to leave a certain segment behind. We make a promise to those employers to help their employees prepare for retirement, and most of them don’t have $1 million.

PLANADVISER: The AFS announcement certainly caught the industry’s attention. Can you explain that deal and how you’ll be incorporating things such as their proprietary financial wellness platform?

DENOYIOR: We take pride at Hub in our acquisitions and making sure that we bring in a really good group of people. When we do that, we don’t just change the culture. We want to adopt their culture into ours and really leverage great teamwork to help expand their opportunities.

Alex [Assaley] and crew have always looked at this business through very innovative lenses. That fits well for us in matching what we do. They have very similar goals as us in that they’re focused on improving outcomes.

On the financial wellness side, they have MoneyNav, which is fantastic, and we have FinPath, which has recently been scaled. I will actually be in meetings with [AFS] tomorrow and our FinPath folks.

Obviously, we’ve had the power of investment behind us, and we’ve had the power a much broader usage [among participants] because of the number of plans we have. We feel very confident there. But AFS has done some things in their MoneyNav that have really driven results. Not only from content, but the way they roll out that content and how they get their users to engage.

So we’re not scrapping anything; we don’t do that. We try to take the best of the best. Overall, the net result will be even stronger wellness offerings through Hub.