PLANADVISER - March/April 2018 - 36

PLANSPONSOR
RETIREMENT
PLAN ADVISER SMALL TEAM
OF THE YEAR FINALISTS
MHK Retirement Partners
UBS Retirement Plan Consulting - Milwaukee
MHK Retirement Partners, in
Madison, Wisconsin, says it
serves clients " from the boardroom
to the break room " and
stresses its ability to have
personal and individual interaction
with participants to help
them achieve retirement readiness.
Two
years ago, the team
BUSINESS AT A GLANCE
PLAN ASSETS UNDER ADVISEMENT:
$587 billion
MEDIAN PLAN SIZE, IN ASSETS:
$5.1 million
PLANS UNDER ADMINISTRATION: 68
PARTICIPANTS: 10,800
made mandatory employee meetings an emphasis, and
many plan sponsors have embraced the initiative. These
meetings with participants are a fundamental part of MHK
Retirement Partners' passion for tracking and measuring
plan and client success in terms of retirement readiness.
The team so believes in the need for proper data to get
those success measures that it created a propriety CEFEXcertified
retirement plan management software solution:
Standard of (k)are. Of course, the firm tracks what one
might consider standard plan data points-participation
rates, deferral rates-of both highly compensated and nonhighly
compensated employees (HCEs and NHCEs)-and
the percentages of employees maximizing the match and
having a " diversified allocation. " But, additionally, through
Standard of (k)are, the team creates a plan summary called
the Plan Avatar that rolls up information such as risk tolerance,
level
of financial knowledge, income replacement
needs, outside savings amounts, etc., derived from the
employee one-on-one meetings.
MHK uses the avatar to identify demographics of plan
participants at a more granular level, which can result in
more in-depth plan design discussions with plan sponsor
clients. These types of discussions have led MHK to get the
majority of its plan sponsor clients to implement automatic
enrollment and automatic increase programs. The data can
also be used to measure the effectiveness of educational
efforts. This past year, one of the team's areas of emphasis
has been on creating custom education campaigns. -ACM
THE UBS philosophy is " Advice.
Beyond Investing. " As Bruce
Lanser puts it, " We believe
nowhere is that more true than
in servicing retirement plans
in general, and 401(k) plans
[specifically]. These require
advice, but also demand a lot of
client education and sharing of
knowledge. We strongly believe
that knowing our clients is the key to helping them succeed. "
The UBS Retirement Plan Consulting - Milwaukee team
BUSINESS AT A GLANCE
PLAN ASSETS UNDER ADVISEMENT:
$1.1 billion
MEDIAN PLAN SIZE, IN ASSETS:
$35 million
PLANS UNDER ADMINISTRATION: 14
PARTICIPANTS: 30,000
is made up of two advisers-husband and wife Bruce and
Bernadette Lanser-and a client service assistant. Like all
advisers on teams, Bruce and Bernadette collaborate and
share perspectives, but what may be different from other
teams, says Bruce, is their ability to understand and relate
to how families plan for their financial future.
To help clients succeed, he says, the team's targets
for client plans are " ambitious but important " and follow
behavioral economist Shlomo Benartzi's 90-10-90 philosophy:
90% employee participation, a savings rate of 10%
of income, and 90% of participants invested in the proper
asset-allocation/qualified-default-investment-alternative
(QDIA) option. To help get there, the UBS Milwaukee team
has encouraged automatic features that are more aggressive
than are industry averages.
" We have increased the default retirement contribution
rate to 6%, up from 3%, and the automatic escalation rate
is now at 2% annually for most clients, " Lanser says. " In
addition, participants who contribute less than 6% of their
income to retirement savings were moved up to 6%. We
also periodically re-enroll people who have opted out of the
auto-escalation programs. "
Part of the emphasis on helping participants succeed
involves educating plan sponsors about the costs they incur
when employees cannot afford to retire, most notably health
care costs and lost productivity. -ACM
36 | planadviser.com march-april 2018
http://www.planadviser.com
PLANADVISER - March/April 2018

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