PLANADVISER - March/April 2019 - 44

advisory and recordkeeping services, revenue sharing and
share classes, and how we benchmark all of these fees. "
Shepherd Financial backs up the training with material
that helps committee members understand the training's
practical application for their plan work. That includes
giving committees a fiduciary calendar and a checklist of
duties related to the responsibilities covered in each module.
What should be key takeaways from committee training?
Before they get training, committee members may not even
be aware of their fiduciary status, Wylam says. " [They] often
don't know if they're a fiduciary, " he says. " Our training
helps them understand their roles and responsibilities. And
we emphasize carefully documenting everything as part of
their prudent process. "
Most of all, the key thing committee members need to
understand is the fiduciary duty of loyalty to the plan participant,
says adviser Jake Winegrad, a partner at Moneta Group
The key thing committee
members need to understand
is the fiduciary duty of loyalty
to the plan participant.
Investment Advisors LLC in St. Louis. " If you look at the litigation
happening in the marketplace, what tends to happen is
that committee members are making decisions in the best
interests of someone other than the participants, " he says.
" You have to make all decisions in the best interests of participants,
and you have to document that all decisions are made
in the best interests of participants. "
Costin agrees that the single most important takeaway
is the duty to consider only the best interests of participants
in making fiduciary decisions. And it is a good idea
to give the committee examples of how that principle can
apply to its plan work. Employees who serve on a retirement
plan committee wear two hats at work, she says:
as an employee, and as a plan fiduciary. " As soon as they
go into a plan committee meeting, they need to take off
their hat as an employee, who has a duty of loyalty to the
company, and put on the hat of a fiduciary with a duty of
loyalty to the plan's participants, " she says.
When Greenspring Advisors does training, Itzoe says,
he hopes it gives committee members an awareness of how
important their fiduciary responsibility is. " It seems like
that would be intuitive, but sometimes committee members
don't grasp how much influence they have, " he says. " We
hope this will wake them up and they'll say, 'OK, I do have a
lot of responsibility and a lot of potential liability.' "
Itzoe also hopes that training gives committee members
the knowledge they need to monitor their plan providers.
" They need to learn how to ask providers some of the right
questions, " he says. " If they don't ask the right questions,
they're not going to get the right answers. They'll be much
more knowledgeable after training, and then they can hold
their service providers accountable. "
Training Tips
To train committees effectively, it will help to keep these
tips in mind:
* Have a structured training program. Moneta Group
often gets hired to help plan committees develop structured
fiduciary processes, and in those cases it puts together
customized training based on a committee's needs, Winegrad
says. For other fiduciary training, his firm uses an
Fi360 fiduciary training package as the framework. " We do
the training, though Fi360 provides the materials, " he says.
Greenspring Advisors has provided fiduciary training
for more than a decade. " Version 1 was 10 to 12 slides on
the basics of ERISA and fiduciary responsibilities, and we
covered that information with our clients in an unstructured
way, " Itzoe recalls. " But since then, we've developed
a more formal curriculum. " With counsel from law firm
Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, Greenspring has developed
online training it calls " Fiduciary U, " which it utilizes for its
own clients and licenses for others to use.
* Make it convenient. When not doing customized
committee training, Moneta does committee training by
offering it online for multiple clients at a time, Winegrad
says. Besides this being more efficient for Moneta, it can
make getting the training more efficient for clients versus
having an in-person meeting. " We are rolling that out via
webinar, to make it easier for people to access, " he says. " You
know how it is: People are strapped for time. "
Greenspring's Fiduciary U online training takes around
two hours for committee members to complete, Itzoe says.
The training utilizes a technique known as " chunking " to
group the complex information on fiduciary responsibilities
into small, understandable pieces. " There is considerable
research that shows people can take in only so much information
at once, " he says. " Each chapter has three to 12 brief
lessons, and each lesson is a one-to-two-minute video. "
Every chapter ends with a quick quiz on the topics
covered, and the training finishes with an online final exam,
after which committee members get a certificate of completion.
On the back end, the Fiduciary U technology allows
an adviser to track usage information, including which
committee members have started the training and which
have completed it.
* Try to pique their interest. An adviser cannot guarantee
that all committee members will pay close attention
to all of the information covered in training. As Franchimone
says, " You can take the horse to the well, but you can't force
it to drink. "
To that end, he tries to make the training entertaining,
when possible. For example, he often recounts the time a CEO
told him lightheartedly that he wanted to hire RBC " to keep
him out of horizontal stripes, " meaning to keep the CEO out
of a prison uniform. " You get a laugh, " he says. " It's funny-if
you are not dealing with that situation. " -Judy Ward
44 | planadviser.com March-April 2019
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PLANADVISER - March/April 2019

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