Plan advisers: A growth opportunity

It's interesting to hear the word regulations and opportunity in the same sentence. But in this case, we think those two things go together. So the Department of Labor has been working really hard for years to drive greater transparency into the retirement plan market which we think is long overdue. We think employees in 401K plans are among the most vulnerable investors in the market place. It typically don't know anything about investing. They don't understand how their plan works. They don't understand the fees in the investment options and things like that. So the Department of Labor, we think has taken some real steps forward in shining some light on those corners of the market place which leads to the opportunity for fiduciary advisors because they are very well-positioned already to meet these regulations which is essentially say, what's services am I providing to the plan? How am I being compensated for providing those services and to what degree am I a fiduciary to the plan? RAAs are perfectly positioned to answer those questions. They are ready fee-only fiduciaries operating with full transparency and not getting paid from other sources. So the opportunity is there standing directly from these regulations. Almost all advisors are advising business owners on their personal wealth side and a lot of times advisors will tell us some of their business owner clients were asking them, would you really like the services you're providing me as individual? Can you look at my 401K plan? Can you help me with that? So that's a natural source of new business development for the advisors, business owner clients. And then you gotta make some decisions. Do I want to just sell the plan? Do I wanna be an advice provider to the plan? What about to the participants in the plan? Do I want to provide advice to participants or just to the plan in helping setup the plan menu of investments? There's a lot of decisions there that need to be made as to how you really wanna go after that market. And then, really first you want to decide. Do I wanna sort of dabble in this market? Some advisors tell us, well I just would like to be able to say yes when that business owner ask me that question. Other say, I see big opportunity here and I wanna drive hard into it and really build my business this way. Between 5 and 10 percent of our advisors are actively involved in advising on 401K plans. We think that number should be a lot higher. We think the opportunity is much, much better than only 5 or 10 percent of advisors taking advantage of that. So we're doing a lot of education at events like this we have a number of sessions teaching you how you can get involved in this market. Where the opportunities coming out of these regulations? Where the pit falls? What are the things you need to be aware of and being in a risk of fiduciary? We're putting out research papers on how to navigate these waters. We're doing webinars for advisors. We're introducing advisors to others in the market place. Vendors who can help them, record keepers, temps and others who can help them succeed and get involved in this market place