FAANGS and other forces that could disrupt business for retirement plan advisers

If there is anything that recent history has taught participants in the retirement-plan market, it's that change is coming faster than expected. Regulation and technology are two of the biggest drivers of recent changes, so it's likely they will continue to disrupt for the foreseeable future. What additional changes could these forces bring about, and what else could shake things up? Here are a smattering of possibilities that the retirement-plan community may find itself facing. Attack of the FAANGS. No one expects Amazon or Google to hire armies of advisers to dispense retirement advice. But extraordinarily well-capitalized and ubiquitous tech giants could slice the market and grab the portions where they see gains from automation and scale. Facebook 401(k)s anyone? The gig economy becomes the economy. The defined-contribution market's growth is predicated on the assumption that employers want to retain their best employees. What if there were greater economic, tax and social incentives to use contract workers? What if benefits such as retirement savings and health care were decoupled from the workplace? Participants become even less informed and engaged. Everyone acknowledges that Americans are woefully ill-informed and undereducated about personal finance and the financial demands of their post-working years. What if this abysmal state of affairs gets worse? The retirement-plan community may find itself meeting enormous new challenges in the field of personal financial education and behavioral training. Cybersecurity threats. All areas of finance are tackling the thorny problem of security and privacy, but hackers and other bad actors are becoming ever more sophisticated. Big spending on technology has always been expected of banks and the industry's other large players, but smaller participants may also be pressed to increase tech spending to keep up with the complexity of maintaining data security. Evan Cooper is a freelance writer.