Legend - Bill Chetney

When Bill Chetney sold his 401(k) distribution business a little more than a decade ago to ING for a handsome sum, he was ready to hang up his career cleats. He had worked hard and prospered in the retirement plan marketplace, beginning in retail sales for a broker/dealer, then migrating, as many advisers did at that time, to the institutional side. Now, he was ready to have some fun.

So Chetney, then 40, departed the workplace to spend more time with his wife and four kids and travel the world. He visited Europe, Australia, South America, and other points around the globe. He came home and played golf. He was financially comfortable. Life was good, but the yen to get back into the retirement plan arena kept pulling at him, and his wife was encouraging him to return to the business he loved.

So Chetney, whose former company—ReliaStar—was one of the first to offer an open-architecture 401(k) product to plan sponsors, jumped back onto the merry-go-round, and his ride has been nothing short of astounding. He forged what he says was the largest 401(k) adviser business in the country, National Retirement Partners (NRP), which was bought by LPL Financial last year. Now, he leads a new LPL division, as Executive Vice President, that has 5,000 plan advisers serving 25,000 defined contribution plans.

Just as he was a visionary in offering open-architecture investment arrangements to plan sponsors before he sold Reliastar to ING, his founding of NRP eight years ago also was innovative. As he was abandoning his life as a globetrotter, Chetney saw that the retirement plan industry was evolving dramatically into a business where product manufacturers were declining in clout while professional intermediaries were becoming key players. Plan sponsors were relying more than ever before on these advisers for help in designing and running their plans. Yet, the advisers weren’t being served well by their broker/dealers, he believed.

Chetney saw an opportunity to bring together top advisers from across the country. If advisers came under one umbrella, he theorized, they could share ideas and expertise and get support in the way of tools and services from one another that they were not receiving from broker/dealers. He took what he calls “a Field of Dreams approach” to creating NRP: Build upon an idea, and they will come, and so they did. Chetney booked 100 rooms in a hotel in Kona, Hawaii, and announced that he was holding a conference for top advisers to come together and essentially form a collective. The conference, which Chetney now says “was the tipping point” for NRP, drew 120 advisers.

Following the sale of NRP to LPL, people who knew Chetney’s history, who remembered that he had literally hit the road after he sold out to ING, wondered whether the industry visionary might again ditch retirement planning to satisfy a new wanderlust. Don’t count on it this time, says Chetney, now 51. “If you’re passionate about what you do, it’s not work,” he says.

He’s passionate, at least in part, because he sees a new mission for himself and his advisers. He believes the professional retirement plan adviser today must take a holistic approach to the business. The focus can’t be solely on helping the sponsor and the plan; it also must be on giving participants the help they need to save adequately for retirement, he says.

“I’m absolutely passionate about educating America on the need to save,” Chetney says. American workers are in the habit of consuming, of transferring their earnings to others, he asserts: “I emphasize that people should pay themselves first. It’s an undercommunicated message.” By that, he means that he wants to see advisers converse with participants, on an individual basis, so that, instead of spending every penny they earn each week, they deposit $15 or $20 into their defined contribution (DC) plans. Then, they’ll have substantial savings after 20 or 30 years in the workforce, Chetney says. The industry—including advisers—shouldn’t wait until workers are on the cusp of retirement to converse about planning for their post-­workplace lives, he insists. They must begin the conversation when people first enter the workforce.

Chetney believes that message to participants should come in the form of one-on-one conversations. He emphasizes that he prefers to use the word “conversation,” rather than “advice.”“That’s because it’s not always about alpha and beta yield,” he explains. “It’s also other questions—such as health care and life planning. In the coming decade, those questions are going to be dealt with best in the workplace, and the retirement plan professionals are in the [best] position to deliver those offerings.”

Chetney thinks that, although the industry has done a “tremendous” job in bringing important efficiencies and pricing gains to the market, “we haven’t been as focused on a holistic education for participants about their future.” He would like to see advisers offer education not just on a quarterly or annual basis, but also whenever a participant needs it. This is especially true, in Chetney’s view, now that workers no longer can depend on the other two legs of the retirement income stool: Social Security and pension plans. “We need to calibrate the education with the fact that [the DC plan] is going to be all people have to count on,” he says.

While others in the industry might rue the enhanced regulation that Washington is visiting upon retirement plans, Chetney sees initiatives like 408(b)(2) as salutary. They bring a needed clarity to what should and should not be done in serving retirement plans, he points out, and will weed out those advisers who really do not have the expertise to be in the business.

As for the future prospects of those advisers who do remain in the industry, he predicts the ones who succeed “will be those who focus not just on plans as a whole but also on the underlying participant.” That is what his work with LPL now will enable him to do, Chetney suggests. By concentrating on the welfare of the participant, he and his collective of advisers will be able to “complete the vision” that first brought him into retirement planning. “This puts us in a dominant position,” he contends.  —Louis Berney 

The “Legend” 

It is hard to ignore the impact that Bill Chetney’s idea, and resulting company, had on the retirement plan adviser industry. In some ways, the wave of broker/dealers creating specialty services for their retirement plan advisers is a result of the success of National Retirement Partners. Chetney’s success in bringing together some of the nation’s best and brightest advisers and providing marketing and branding services, and later luring them away from their existing broker/dealers, was a force to be reckoned with.

Bill Chetney is Executive Vice President of LPL Financial Retirement Partners, a division created by the firm following its 2010 acquisition of National Retirement Partners (NRP). In this role, he is responsible for leading the firm’s retirement business and providing tools, services, and technology solutions to 5,000 participating advisers with 25,000 plans. Before joining LPL Financial, Chetney, who has 20 years’ experience in the retirement plan business, was the Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of NRP. He was responsible for the strategic supervision of NRP’s member firms’ network and acquisitions, member firm relationships, and product development. In an earlier role, Chetney served as a Partner and National Sales Manager for Michael K. Farrell & Associates, where he was instrumental in the development of a proprietary 401(k) product for Reliastar Financial Corporation, which was later sold to ING Group. He also was Senior Regional Vice President for Mutual Benefit Pension Corporation, responsible for managing operations in the western United States. Chetney earned an MBA from Claremont Graduate University and a Bachelor of Arts in organizational psychology from Pitzer College. He is FINRA Series 7 registered through LPL Financial and is currently on the Board of Regents for the Boys & Girls Club of Capistrano Valley.