October 12, 2017

2016 RPAY – Jania Stout

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A 20-year veteran of the retirement planning industry, Jania Stout, managing director of Fiduciary Plan Advisors, started in the industry in recordkeeping and administration at ADP and Fidelity Investments. Wanting to have a greater role in engaging with and offering advice to plan sponsors, eight years ago, Stout became an adviser, and two years ago, she founded her practice in order to “truly help our plan sponsor clients.”

“The past eight years working as a plan adviser have been extremely rewarding,” she says. “Anyone who knows me or works for me knows that I am in this business to change lives. It is not just about charts and graphs and market returns. It is about protecting my clients and helping participants get over the finish line.”

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Stout prides herself on taking a fresh look at retirement planning, starting with a financial wellness program she launched in 2012, well ahead of today’s concentration on financial wellness. “It was important to me that I delivered to my clients in-person financial education and not just rely on the providers,” who, she thought, were not doing as good of a job as she would have liked. So, Stout decided to invest the time and resources to create a well-thought-out financial wellness program.

Stout called the program H.E.R.O., with “H” standing for having a budget, “E” for eliminating debt, “R” for knowing your retirement number, and “O” for owning it. “The feedback I received after rolling that out was amazing,” she says. “That is when I became officially hooked on the idea of financial wellness. If I could help people today with their financial issues, I could get them to focus their resources after paying off debt to save for retirement.” Three years ago, Fiduciary Plan Advisors began offering monthly educational webinars for participants, as well.

The H.E.R.O. financial wellness program is supported by a change in nomenclature for the plans that Stout serves. Rather than call them retirement plans, or 401(k) plans, she is encouraging her clients to refer to them as “life and savings plans” that encompasses more than just retirement savings. In the past 12 months, she has introduced the idea adding post-tax savings to the plans, so that participants can start saving for an emergency fund, pay down debt and, thereby, be better equipped to contribute to their retirement.

With retirement outcomes being paramount to Fiduciary Plan Advisors, Stout has also created a unique position at her practice: the director of participant success. “The biggest impact I have had on improving retirement readiness is creating the role of the director of participant success,” she explains. “This is a salaried position and is someone who works with me and our clients to ensure we deliver the right amount of focus on educating and advising our clients and their participants. We don’t just deliver in-person meetings. We deliver a strategy and spend hours and hours on implementing it.”

The director of participant success is reinforced by a subcommittee for financial wellness that Fiduciary Plan Advisors establishes within every retirement plan committee. Working very closely with the subcommittee, the practice, led by the director of participant success, conducts biweekly calls with the group and reports on progress being made toward the plan’s goals every quarter. “It is probably the most time-consuming aspect of our business model, but it is the most important aspect to helping improve the outcomes for our participants,” Stout says. “It is easy for most advisers to say they do financial education or conduct meetings, but it is the tracking of the outcomes that I think we do a bit differently than most. It is tedious at times, but when you deliver the outcomes and start to see a goal being achieved, it makes it all worth it.”

On the subject of helping participants to save as much as possible, Fiduciary Plan Advisors has also educated one sponsor client about the helpfulness of the post-tax savings to reduce loans. This client has had an ongoing issue with loans, Stout notes. “I am working with the committee now on amending the plan to do away with loans and add a post-tax source for savings. This way, a participant can take money out of the post-tax source, i.e. the emergency fund, and not need to consider a loan. This client has about 3,500 employees, and we are excited to see that if we educate them about having a budget, eliminating debt and making use of the post-tax savings, this will drive better outcomes for them.”

Fiduciary Plan Advisors is as concerned with educating Millennials as it is with other demographic groups about the need to eliminate debt, Stout say:  “Many Baby Boomers, for example, have refinanced their homes several times and are going into retirement with a high percentage of debt and no budget. For the first times in their lives, they will have a big pot of money and not really know how to have that last for their retirement years.” That is why it is as equally important to educate pre-retirees about eliminating debt as it is Millennials, Stout believes.

Better Plan Design

To convince plan sponsor clients to create more robust plan design and embrace financial wellness, Fiduciary Plan Advisors highlights the results of two of its clients that won the PLANSPONSOR Plan Sponsor of the Year awards in 2015 and 2014. Stout’s goal is for 100% of employees to participate in the plan; save an average of 10% a year, including company matches; for 90% of participants to be invested in an asset-allocation solution; and for 90% of participants to be on track for a successful retirement.

The high bar that Stout sets for her plans appears to be working, as 90% of her clients automatically enroll participants, 40% use automatic escalation, 40% have completed a reenrollment, and 100% use an asset-allocation solution.

Fiduciary Plan Services is also working to move all of its clients out of funds with revenue-sharing fees. The firm also clearly states all fees on participant statements.

In addition to these services, Fiduciary Plan Advisors conducts all-day fiduciary training workshops for plan sponsors. For large pension plans, the practice offers outsourced chief investment officer (CIO) searches.

As for what Stout takes the most pride in as a retirement plan adviser, it is “changing the lives of working Americans. It is a big reason why I feel so good about the job I do.”

LOCATION: Phoenix, Maryland
PLAN ASSETS UNDER ADVISEMENT: $1.5 billion
MEDIAN PLAN SIZE (IN ASSETS): $40 million
TOTAL PLANS UNDER ADMINISTRATION: 30
TOTAL PARTICIPANTS IN PLANS SERVED: 25,000
SUPPORT STAFF: 4
October 12, 2017

2016 RPAY – Pension Architects

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PLANADVISER: Tell us about your practice and how you and your team members got into advising retirement plans.
Pension Architects: Our firm was founded based on my original practice founded in 1980, which was a fee-based Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) and financial planning firm based in Washington, D.C. At the time, we were one of the few fee-based practices in the region that eventually became involved in designing and managing corporate retirement plans, most of which at the time were defined benefit (DB \) plans. As a planner, it became apparent that what employees desired and needed most was guidance in overall financial decisions.

When that firm was sold 15 years later, I opened Pension Architects in Los Angeles exclusively as a corporate retirement design firm with a focus (and passion) towards what we had learned in the 80’s, which was that participants needed a sincere advocate who will not only help them plan for retirement, but help with the many day-to-day financial challenges that in many cases prohibited their ability to adequate fund the retirement savings needed. This was the foundation to what has become our Financial Wellness Coaching Program

The team members that are now Pension Architects all believed that the above described process and mission was best accomplished by advising retirement plans enabling us to impact many more people than via a traditional wealth advisory practice.

PA: What is your mission statement?
Pension Architects: Our mission is to reach as many employees and in a broader sense, their spouses and families, to provide objective conflict free advocacy resulting in improved decision making that enables a higher probability of attaining a sufficient and sustainable retirement income.

PA: How is your team/process/structure unique? How has it evolved?
Pension Architects: Our team is unique in that all of us are committed to making a difference in the lives of as many people as possible by providing a relationship that truly makes a measurable difference. The evolution of this process has been a result of our commitment to reviewing behavioral and industry research and using that research to validate or alter our processes and understanding of what works.

PA: What have you done in the past year to improve participants’ retirement readiness?
Pension Architects: In the past year we have spent a great deal of time exploring/developing better technology that encourages participant engagement and longer term involvement with their coach.

PA: Describe any particularly noteworthy initiatives you have led with your customer base in the past 12 months (investment, education, plan design or communication).
Pension Architects: In the past 12 months we have focused on improving sponsors understanding of what metrics are most important to measure; what design aspects that are not being utilized such as  Roth, auto enroll and escalation, and re-enrollment for example that should be evaluated or reconsidered as valuable methods to achieve maximum retirement readiness.

PA: As a retirement plan adviser, what do you take the most pride in?
Pension Architects: I take the most amount of pride in knowing that over the past 2 decades of Pension Architects efforts, we have helped over hundreds of thousands of employees and countless family members by focusing on the daily problems faced by the majority of employees. I am proud that these efforts have resulted in college savings being realized, credit being improved, debts being reduced, wills being drawn, liquidity being raised, and ultimately, all of these and other issues being attended to, resulting in being able to save enough for retirement.

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?
Pension Architects: While we measure the traditional plan level metrics such as participation and deferral rates, loan activity, match utilization, and participant account balances as related to income needs at retirement, we also measure less common metrics that we believe define a successful plan. These metrics are those defined by the Financial Wellness Coaching efforts and include measuring the many financial stress points that can distract and create less focused employees. When clients and prospects don’t share our goals, we use research data and peer studies to (gently) persuade them that these less common non-plan-centric objectives are worth including in the educational effort.

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BUSINESS AT A GLANCE

LOCATION: Los Angeles
TOTAL PLAN ASSETS UNDER ADVISEMENT: $6 billion
MEDIAN PLAN SIZE (IN ASSETS): $28 million
TOTAL PLANS UNDER ADVISEMENT: 75

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