Working with some 1,000 retirement plans certainly keeps Gerald Wernette of Rehmann Financial abreast of the latest trends in retirement. He has some first-person advice to share with other advisors some advice on serving the that market.
"If you're an advisor and you're going to be in this business, you better be working with a model that is going to allow you to monitor the investments in the plan in a way where a [plan sponsor] client can build a due diligence file, show the Department of Labor that they've been doing their job when it comes to monitoring investments in conjunction with an investment policy statement, and have a process for making decisions as to when funds should be changed," he says. "At the same time, they also need to have an ability to do a periodic review of the plan from the perspective of all the different elements that are coming together to make that plan work–what the costs are, how it benchmarks against their peers in the industry–so they can keep a handle on what the plan is costing so they can keep a fair value at the end of the day."
Wernette says more emphasis is being placed on encouraging eligible employees to participate in retirement plans, to contribute enough to those plans and to make good investment decisions. "We're seeing tools like retirement gap analysis become a lot more prevalent out there," he says. "We're also seeing much more emphasis being put on advice solutions, managed account solutions, but I think that's still evolving."
