As an advisor, you have a responsibility to ensure that your clients’ retirement plan fees are reasonable. And every 3 to 5 years, you dutifully take your plans out to market in a live-bid environment — not an insignificant task. But five years can be a long time, during which many things can change. And while you probably remember the results of that last live-bid benchmark, your clients may not. They might find themselves searching their memories to recall what their fees were and how they compared with similar plans. They may face questions from employees that they struggle to answer, and they may find themselves wondering if you’ve been staying on top of their plan fees since that last RFP.
PlanFees fills an important gap in the benchmarking market and the range of services you want to provide to your clients. We listened to all kinds of advisors — including independent operators, small shops that need sales tools and mega-sized firms looking for scalability in order to develop what we think is the perfect “Goldilocks” solution.
It probably doesn’t make sense to get competitive bids more frequently, and most benchmarking analysis reports are either too inaccurate, complex or time consuming to use as an annual fee “checkup.” PlanFees is your “just right” solution to this important problem. By combining the accuracy of live-bid analysis with the features of easy benchmarking tools (and adding a few of our own), PlanFees lets you benchmark in a way that’s accurate, on-demand and revealing.
Accurate Live-Bid Data:
Some fee benchmarking reports use unreliable data sources or are missing crucial factors such as TPA fees. PlanFees allows you to benchmark for bundled and unbundled plans and enter fees as fixed costs or percentages, so no more time-consuming decimal point conversions necessary to get an “apples-to-apples” comparison. And PlanFees is the only competitive benchmarking application whose benchmark universe is based on a database with tens of thousands of “live” pricing quotes, offering a higher degree of accuracy.
On-Demand, Convenient Benchmarking
How long does it ultimately take you to get that “free” vendor benchmark report from start to finish? How many steps are there in the process, how many phone calls are required, how many interruptions to your work and how much additional time is needed to create a professional-looking document you’re proud to share with clients? Half a day? More? Unless you place no value whatsoever on your time — that’s hardly what we’d call “free.” PlanFees is so quick and easy that you can literally benchmark while you Uber to a client meeting (even if there’s no traffic). You can create a professionally branded report that’s clear, concise and easy to read — all in two minutes by entering in a few data points from your fee disclosure statement. It’s that simple. And with your low-cost, monthly subscription, you can benchmark as many plans as you want wherever and whenever you want.
Revealing Benchmark Reports
By clearly showing investment, record-keeping, administration and advisory fees — and how they relate to comparable plans in an easy-to-digest format — you can reveal areas of fiduciary concern for your clients and help them make better, more informed business decisions. And you can customize your benchmark on the fly by adjusting the ranges of participants and plan assets with simple on-screen sliders for even more meaningful comparisons and analyses of how a plan’s “all-in” fees stack up against highly similar plans — or a broader group. You can even remove the low or high comparisons to suit your needs.
Read on our website why more advisors are making the switch to PlanFees, or sign up for our next webinar. Or call (949) 305-3718, and we’ll prepare a free benchmark report for one of your current clients. We want to help you benchmark better — with PlanFees.
