Workplace Retirement Plans: A Distraction or a Business Accelerator?

Your business is all about helping clients achieve their financial goals and optimizing their wealth. Depending on your client base, retirement plans may or may not be a focus of your practice.

I believe there are compelling reasons why they should be.

With catalysts such as the provisions of the SECURE 2.0 Act and states with mandatory retirement plans, many small- to mid-sized business owners are finding the need to enhance their benefit packages—and thus, the demand for retirement plan solutions is expected to grow significantly.

At the same time, organizations that currently have a retirement plan in place are primed for you to help them take a fresh look at their options. A tight labor market increases the need for businesses to provide competitive benefits. Additionally, people are living—and working—longer, which can be costly to an organization’s benefits program. Offering a well-designed, progressive retirement plan that prepares employees to enter their retirement years can help reduce costs, while helping savers achieve better outcomes.

The first point of contact your clients may turn to for guidance is you. Why not strengthen your trusting relationships by adding retirement plans to your discussions?

Higher-income individuals and families are increasingly looking for a more personalized planning experience that factors in all aspects of their financial lives. In response, many advisors are making a transformative shift in their approach by moving toward holistic, client-focused strategies that merge retirement planning and wealth management.

From a business-building, client-retention standpoint, it’s a strategy that makes great sense.

Offering access to full range of qualified and nonqualified plans can help underscore your value as a trusted advisor and help you scale your practice’s growth. Working with retirement plans can also pay dividends down the road.

Whether it is a company starting a new retirement plan or one with a well-established plan in search of better plan outcomes, helping them achieve their retirement plan goals will offer you the opportunity to work with more business owners, senior executives, and plan participants who could become new wealth management clients. The ability to offer retirement plans also can help protect your book of business from retirement-focused advisors who may attempt to solicit the very relationships you’ve worked hard to build.

I often talk with successful wealth management advisors who believe they must be a retirement plan specialist to act on this opportunity. Not so. As the quarterback of your clients’ financial plans, you don’t need to be a retirement plan expert; you just need to work with a retirement solutions provider that is.

The right retirement partner will appreciate and respect the personal relationships you have with clients, allowing you to present solutions without conflicting interests. They will help to educate you on various retirement plans and assist in communicating their value to your clients. They’ll have a tech-enabled platform that takes the complexity out of maintaining a program and ensures service excellence at a reasonable price. They will provide access to advanced data analytics that can help inform plan design decisions and boost plan health. It also means offering strong operational support and fiduciary services to limit both administrative burden and liability associated with sponsoring a retirement plan.

At Ascensus, we’ve been partnering with advisors to bring retirement savings solutions to clients for more than 40 years. Our scalable, efficient technology gives us the ability to offer cost-effective programs, fueled by unbiased partnership and people you can trust. We are uniquely positioned to help you deliver a simple and seamless experience.  

View our latest whitepaper for more on why retirement plans can help accelerate your wealth management business here. Call us to learn more about how Ascensus is ready to partner with you for your success. Or request a proposal if you're ready to get started.

Let’s get there together.