Adviser-Developed Participant Engagement Platform Goes Live

The participant engagement platform Viserly is now available to the broad retirement plan and benefits adviser community. This rollout comes after hundreds of demos, adviser conversations and custom buildouts, says founder Shane Hanson.

Hanson, a retirement plan adviser himself, says he believes advisers have operated at a disadvantage to recordkeepers, as they have not had access to the same data in real time. This is increasingly important, he told PLANADVISER, as the competition between advisers and recordkeepers to own the participant relationship grows.

By creating Viserly, he says, he is working to equip advisers with the tools they need to be competitive: “imagine delivering the right message, at the right time, with genuine relevance—without lifting a finger.”

The platform integrates with more than 200 payroll providers, which allows advisers to be alerted in real time about employee actions, such as new hires and terminations. With this real-time data, advisers are able to respond quickly and proactively to engage with employees and participants ahead of recordkeepers, he says. Advisers get authorization from the plan sponsor client to create this link, he says. While the platform is most useful with access to payroll data, if advisers are not able to get payroll integration, they can upload recordkeeper data to achieve similar segmentation benefits.

Hanson envisions Viserly as a data warehouse for advisers, where they are able to segment data to drive engagement in ways that align with their business model. They can do this by leveraging triggering events, such as new hires, rehires, terminations, birthdays, age milestones or other specific events. Other ways to segment messaging would be to target specific messages to particular demographic groups, such as participants earning more than $150,000 or those with a retirement plan balance that exceeds $250,000. Advisers can have templated messages to align with each of those and set those to automatically deploy, all without adviser involvement.

Viserly integrates with Microsoft and Google email accounts, meaning that when the email messages are sent, they come directly from the adviser’s email and appear in their “sent” email folder. This allow for advisers to remain in compliance, as it all flows through their email system, Hanson notes. This also allows the adviser to keep the preferred advisory brand front and center—with the branding aligning with the adviser the participant knows.

Hanson said advisers interested in learning more about Viserly can request live demos at www.viserly.com.