News

Prospecting emails can play an important role in your marketing funnel as a retirement plan advisor. Other than your blog, email is the only marketing platform that you truly own (sorry Zuckerberg). It also helps that it’s inexpensive, easy to implement and readily allows for automation and integration into your CRM. Moreover, a thoughtful email campaign can help cultivate and strengthen your relationship with potential clients over time — or, it can have the opposite effect if you carpet-bomb their inbox or saddle them with spam.

If you’re looking to grow your 401(k) book of business, cold calling is probably going to be an unavoidable part of your strategy. Here are tips to help turn a cold call into a warm lead or your next new client.

Orange County, CA – May 24, 2021 – PlanFees announced today the launch of a new benchmarking system, the Prism365 Advisor Fee and Services report. PlanFees is a retirement plan fee benchmarking FinTech platform empowering advisors and their plan sponsor clients to “benchmark better.” Since launching in 2020, retirement plan advisors have used PlanFees to benchmark over 30,000 plans, creating more reasonable fees for plan sponsors and enhancing outcomes for plan participants. The Prism365 report will help advisors justify their fees and services by creating accurate, on demand and revealing fee benchmarking reports in less than two minutes.

In an increasingly competitive retirement plan industry where sponsors focus as much on controlling costs as increasing service, retirement plan advisors are caught in a squeeze. Consequently, advisors need insights into optimal service deliverables and their frequencies. 

New fintech platform invites retirement plan advisors and institutions to “Benchmark Better”

Orange County, CA – May 13, 2020 – PlanFees announced today the launch of a new fee benchmarking technology platform empowering retirement plan advisors and their plan sponsor clients to “benchmark better.” 

If it hasn’t started already, you’ll likely soon be inundated with questions and concerns about the market’s — and your firm’s — response to COVID-19. You may be contacted by plan sponsors, participants and coworkers en masse, all trying to figure out how to best navigate the crisis.

Live-bid benchmarking is a necessity for advisors who want to ensure they’re meeting their fiduciary obligations. But while traditional methods are necessary, they’re not sufficient to meet all the needs of today’s retirement plan advisor.

Economic downturns aren’t good news for anyone, but for plan sponsors and fiduciaries, they can signal double trouble as the harbinger of looming litigation. After the financial meltdown of 2008, the number of 401(k) complaints filed under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) spiked to a high of 107. The number of new lawsuits dwindled to just two filings in 2013 before rising again. Experts fear the COVID-19 crisis could spawn a rash of new class-action 401(k) lawsuits from participants unhappy with the present state of their investments.

As part of the CARES Act, plan sponsors can now offer coronavirus-related distributions (CRDs) as a means to offer participants greater access to their retirement funds and help deal with hardships associated with COVID-19. This option waives the 10% early withdrawal penalty for participants under age 59 1/2 for amounts up to $100,000 on 401(k)s or IRAs taken between January 1 and December 31st of 2020.

Q: What Do All of These Have in Common?