October 12, 2017

2015 RPAY – Corby Dall

Reported by

PA: What is your mission statement?

Corby Dall: We are a family business. So, we treat our clients like family, and, by extension, we consider their employees family, too. The highest form of recognition an employer can offer valued employees is a way for them to retire comfortably. We help employers deliver on this. We have a clear passion to help as many people as possible to retire with dignity, and it is manifest in everything we do.

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PA: What have you done in the past year to improve participants’ retirement readiness?

CD: I am passionate about using whatever method is most successful in getting more Americans on track to retire on their own terms. Plan design remains the most powerful way to do this. We employ a plan design optimization study process, which we consulted on building. It assists the client in evaluating the current retirement readiness ratios of its entire population, individually. We factor in account balances, Social Security, savings rates, investment returns, wage growth and retirement ages. This individualized analysis on every employee creates insightful work force data that the client has never seen or likely even considered before.

The outcome is a report that allows the employer to examine gaps in its employees’ retirement savings. The report also allows us to show the impact of various plan design options and the effect they have on each employee’s retirement readiness. The plan-design levers that this report illustrates are: automatic enrollment and annual re-enrollment, automatic increase, and re-enrollment to some type of asset-allocation vehicle to create better, more consistent investment diversification. We plug in various scenarios for each lever, and this helps the client assess the expected outcomes in real dollars and cents for the company and the employees. This leads to far more willingness to adopt these beneficial initiatives, and allows the committee to have more meaningful data to share internally to get executive/decisionmaker buy-in. We also run this report in subsequent years to measure its effectiveness.

I have also found it most successful to connect the committee with other clients of ours who have already been down this road. This has doubled our uptake on automatic plan features in recent years and has given the client much more confidence, while promoting camaraderie inside our family of clients. 

A great example of the success of this design initiative, paired with our robust participant education process, is our client the O.C. Tanner company. It was recognized as a PLANSPONSOR Plan Sponsor of the Year in 2014. It has achieved over 97% participation and high retirement readiness with a very diverse work force.

PA: Describe a difficult client situation and how it was resolved.

CD: What was a new client of ours with a very complex, large organization and a severely neglected plan just credited us with helping it sail through an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit.

When we took over as the adviser, we went to work reorganizing the structure of the committee and helped it put the right players in place in order to get things done in a timelier manner. We also took the plan through our fiduciary and operational audit process, which mimics an audit or investigation by the IRS or Department of Labor (DOL). We were able to find or reconstruct many missing pieces and create a fiduciary vault housing all required documents, minutes and processes that make up a well-documented and well-run plan.

The process took almost one year to complete but gave the client peace of mind, knowing it was in good shape going forward. A few years later, it was “blessed” with an IRS plan audit. I am happy to report that the audit just ended and the client came through with a clean bill of health.

PA: As a retirement plan adviser, what do you take the most pride in?

CD: I feel like my service team and I really make a difference in so many participants’ lives and give great peace of mind to their employers. This is my original mission, and I am very blessed to have it coming to fruition.

BUSINESS AT A GLANCE

PLAN ASSETS UNDER ADVISEMENT: $1.6 billion

MEDIAN PLAN SIZE (IN ASSETS): $8 million

TOTAL PLANS UNDER ADVISEMENT: 134

TOTAL PARTICIPANTS IN PLANS SERVED: 53,000
October 12, 2017

2015 RPAY – Jason Chepenik

Reported by

PA: What is your mission statement?

Jason Chepenik: Our true mission is to empower all people with the resources they need to live the life they dream, to always use our “We go beyond” attitude in every aspect of our business every single day.

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PA: Please describe any special education or communication initiatives you’ve undertaken with plan sponsors or participants.

JC: We have one particular approach, the 4.01k Race for Financial Fitness. We developed the idea as a corporate wellness initiative, and April is National Financial Literacy Month, so it seemed like a perfect fit. The race will be held on 4/01, April 1, at 4:01 p.m.

Furthermore, we teamed up with Junior Achievement so that all proceeds will go toward the advancement of financial literacy. Our vision is to have the race in 25 cities across America next year. Lastly, we developed a series of videos highlighting the commonality between physical and financial wellness.

PA: As a retirement plan adviser, what do you take the most pride in?

JC: Being different from our peers! Most firms focus on the three core competencies—fees, investments and fiduciary governance. While those are certainly of primary concern to us, our overall philosophy focuses on a much bigger goal: efficacy. In other words, is your plan really serving its purpose? Are your employees really preparing themselves adequately for a comfortable retirement? Are they on track to being able to comfortably retire when they choose?

Finally, are we really doing everything we can to propel them to the retirement finish line on time? So, in actuality, our consulting philosophy goes beyond investments. We know that creative plan design, aggressive participant engagement and rigorous evaluation all contribute to plan success and the best possible participant outcomes. We come in firing on all cylinders. That’s what we mean by our corporate tagline—“We go beyond.”

PA: What benchmarks do you use to measure plan and client success? How do you react to clients or prospects who don’t share your goals for their retirement plan?

JC: We know that there are three factors that contribute to the strongest and most successful plans:

  1. A commitment from leadership that their retirement plan is important to the organization;
  2. An active and engaged decisionmaking process or committee; and
  3. Most importantly, people—in human resources (HR), payroll, etc.—who are willing to listen to and implement new ideas.

We work with our clients to develop, implement and measure an ongoing strategy based on factors that their retirement committee deems important in defining plan success for their organization. At the end of the day, our job is to make the retirement plan come alive, and that is an ongoing process that demands continuous engagement and attention from both sides. 

PA: What are the most important issues your plan sponsors face with their company retirement plan, and what specific actions do you take to assist them in overcoming those issues?

JC: The primary issue is clearly a lack of operational efficiency. Most of the plans we initially engage with are focused on the wrong things—investments, education, etc. Many of them have not built electronic data bridges between their payroll files and their recordkeeper. One initial action is to eliminate all paper transactions by requiring all participants to call the vendor or log on to the vendor’s website for all participant actions.

We will also have the plan outsource all loan and hardship approvals, further reducing the administrative load to our client. If we can make the plan operation as administratively efficient as possible, we will mitigate risk and maximize profitability, allowing the client to focus on all the fun stuff—this makes their plan come alive! Making their plan come alive is about effective messaging. Most clients historically let their vendor control the messaging, and this is where we shine.

BUSINESS AT A GLANCE

PLAN ASSETS UNDER ADVISEMENT: $850 million

MEDIAN PLAN SIZE (IN ASSETS): $6 million

TOTAL PLANS UNDER ADVISEMENT: 72

TOTAL PARTICIPANTS IN PLANS SERVED: 35,000

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