Betterment announced in September that it is launching a 401(k) platform, Betterment for Business, to offer personalized advice to all participants.
Participants will be able to invest in globally diversified portfolio of index-tracking ETFs, and open other investment accounts, IRAs and trust accounts alongside their 401(k). Betterment will also provide tax management for all of a participant's accounts.
The new platform will be available to firms of all sizes beginning in the first quarter of 2016.
Jon Stein, founder and CEO of Betterment, believes his firm can provide a better user experience for retirement savers and at a lower cost.
Stein said that creating a 401(k) platform has been a goal of Betterment's "since Day 1," but came second to other priorities until the firm tried to set up a 401(k) for its own employees.
"We found the process to be so cumbersome and the end result so unsatisfactory that it raised this to the top of our priorities," he told ThinkAdvisor.com.
While looking for low costs and a "decent participant experience" for Betterment's employees, Stein said those things were "impossible to find" and expensive to boot. "Even the plan that's the cheapest we could find on the market was something like 82 basis points all in. For that you ought to get a lot. You ought to at least get some good services or user experience, but no, that's the bare-bones product with no advice for participants and no user experience and no coordination with outside assets, nothing."
Fees on Betterment's platform will be based on assets under management and will range from 10 basis points for small plans to 60 bps for the largest plans, Stein said. Sponsors who have more than $1 million in assets will have no upfront fee.
"These are most likely the lowest costs in the market," he said, noting that a "typical plan costs something like 1.5% per year, maybe it's 2% per year," with some large plans offering mutual fund that cost "50 basis points or more and then fund management costs of another 1% on top of that."
"It's a really backwards, fee-laden industry," Stein said.
Outdated technology is also contributing to bloated fees and inefficient plans, he suggested. "The legacy firms were built on technology from 30 years ago. They don't even know how to handle ETFs. They're built on mutual funds and they're built on these old conflicts of interest and old technology."
Betterment will be able to offer the fees it does because "we've done all this work to improve the back-end processes," he said. "We're building from scratch a new platform that's better aligned with our customers. Instead of manufacturing ETFs, we're able to choose the best ETFs from the market."
The user experience was a key factor in developing the platform, according to Stein. "Typically most people don't even know how to log in to their 401(k) plan [provider's platform]," he said.
After finding what those bare-bones 401(k)s were charging for no advice and a poor experience, Betterment sought to make saving for retirement a better experience overall for participants.
"We're starting with the award-winning Betterment user experience: the mobile apps, the integrated view of all your holdings, all your accounts in one place. It's intuitive, it makes good sense, it's easy to access."
Participants on Betterment's platform will get advice on how much to save, which accounts to save in, estimates of how much they'll need to save and whether they're on track. It'll also incorporate other sources of income like Social Security benefits and any pensions or outside accounts.
"Everyone should have access to this kind of advice," Stein said. "In a country where we require people to save for their own retirement rather than provide for it fully, we ought to have access to great advice about how much that means we have to save."
