March 26, 2019

2019 RPAY – Dan Peluse

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“Retirement and financial goals are moving targets, which means my role is to provide new ideas and flexible guidance,” says Dan Peluse, director of retirement plan services, at Wintrust, in Chicago. “We set attainable goals and work tirelessly to achieve them. Whether that’s at the plan sponsor or participant level, my goal is to ensure that my clients understand the options available to them and how to best utilize those options to produce financial flexibility.”

To find plan sponsor clients, Peluse markets through Wintrust’s internal referral sources, which include traditional wealth/financial advisers along with commercial bankers and lenders, and works closely with each partner to help it better understand his service model, the value he offers and what he considers the ideal prospective client.

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Once a client is on board, Peluse emphasizes retirement readiness and sets a goal of getting participants comfortably on track to replace 80% of income. He factors in all of the person’s existing retirement savings including current plan assets, outside assets and Social Security, current savings rate and asset allocation.

To help the plan sponsor also work toward this goal, he promotes and utilizes: automatic plan features including automatic enrollment, automatic escalation and re-enrollment; individual meetings with participants to assist in establishing appropriate retirement savings rates and investment asset allocation; analysis of individual participant retirement income projections to better identify retirement spending needs, including health care costs; and the use of targeted participant communication materials.

“Our industry and regulations have forced plan sponsors and their employees to be experts in an area that is overwhelmed by acronyms, terms and strategies. I work proactively to provide clarity, insight and effective solutions to accomplish a level of comfort and a path toward achieving financial milestones,” Peluse says. To that end, he also works with plan sponsors to improve participant financial wellness and literacy, integrating topics such as budgeting and emergency savings, health savings accounts (HSAs), 529 college savings plans, Social Security planning, insurance planning and estate planning.

“Participant interaction is the most important aspect of my service model,” he says. “There’s no better feeling than seeing a participant’s reaction when you’ve helped them remove financial stressors from their life.”

The next challenge for the industry, he says, will be to address the decumulation challenge. Many of the plan design initiatives have been successful in improving participant outcomes, so now “our focus must move to creating integrated, affordable and understandable decumulation options to provide participants with sustainable and reliable monthly income post-retirement.”
March 26, 2019

2019 RPAY – James Lyday

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James Lyday spent the first two decades of his retirement industry career working for several of the largest service providers. His varied roles across the provider spectrum showed him there was a significant disconnect between what plan sponsors and participants needed and what advisers and consultants delivered. Deciding to buck his traditional role and change the segment of the industry he worked in, he heeded the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: “The best way to effect the change you want is to be the change yourself,” Lyday paraphrases. “And I did. I became an adviser.”

From the start, Lyday, now managing director of Pensionmark in Nashville, has employed an advisory model focused on the concepts of process, prudence and participant outcomes. This means scoring and quantifying the process of investing and plan administration; surrounding each plan with prudent experts: adviser, recordkeeper, third-party administrator (TPA), plan auditor and investment managers; and guiding participants to financial, and physical, stability and wellness.

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“The breadth and depth of my experience has uniquely shaped my philosophy, knowledge and abilities,” Lyday says. “As a result, I bring a level of innovation and provide solutions to plan sponsors and participants beyond what they’ve typically been provided or, in some cases, what they are even aware they need,” he says.

From meetings with existing and prospective plan sponsors clients, he has learned that they all generally agree on plan fiduciaries’ most important roles: complying with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) by having maximum governance to avoid complaints, litigation and bad audits; increasing the efficiency of the plan’s administration; and getting better outcomes for employees in order to maximize productivity, improve the company’s balance sheet and decrease the overall health care spend.

Still, many plan sponsors are disconnected from their participants’ needs and wants and believe they’ll encounter more push-back to proper plan design changes than will likely be the case, so Lyday works to overcome such sponsor resistance to valuable plan changes he suggests.

In light of the increased focus on health savings accounts (HSAs) as a part of retirement income planning, Lyday recently received a Certified Health Savings Advisor (CHSA) designation and has incorporated HSA consulting into his practice. He will assist plan sponsors in selecting the most appropriate HSA provider to ensure that not only the administrative aspects are optimal but also the investment options and fees because he believes these accounts can help give participants a significant advantage to meeting their retirement readiness goals. 

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