Deals & People March 7, 2014

2014 PLANADVISER Lifetime Achievement Award

At the annual PLANSPONSOR/PLANADVISER Awards for Excellence Dinner, Jim McCarthy, head of workplace and investment solutions at Morgan Stanley, will be honored with the 2014 PLANADVISER Lifetime Achievement Award.
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McCarthy also serves as a member of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management (MSWM)’s management committee. His group supports the firm’s financial advisers in the retirement markets, both corporate and personal, including its corporate retirement directors and Graystone Consulting’s institutional consulting directors. The group oversees the distribution of mutual funds, annuities, insurance products, exchange-traded funds and notes (ETFs and ETNs), and unit investment trusts; it also is accountable for the relationship management function for the traditional asset management community that distributes through MSWM. 

 

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One of the largest businesses of its kind in the world, with more than $1.8 trillion in client assets, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management provides a range of wealth management products and services to individuals, businesses and institutions. 

 

Prior to his current role, McCarthy was accountable for retirement, corporate stock programs, financial planning and trust services at Morgan Stanley.

 

McCarthy currently serves on the board of the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and on the board of Morgan Stanley Private Bank, N.A., where he is a member of the trust committee.

 

He earned a B.S. from the College of William and Mary and a J.D. from St. John’s University.

 

“Jim has championed the retirement-focused plan adviser. His support for these advisers at Morgan Stanley and at Graystone Consulting has facilitated the growth and development of among the most sophisticated retirement deliverables in the industry. Thousands of plans across the country, and the hundreds of thousands of participants in these plans, have achieved better retirement outcomes as a result of Jim’s efforts,” said Alison Cooke Mintzer, editor-in-chief of PLANADVISER.

2014 PLANSPONSOR Lifetime Achievement Award

 

Also at the dinner, Charles Nelson, president of Retirement Services at Great-West Financial, will be given the 2014 PLANSPONSOR Lifetime Achievement Award.

 

Nelson joined Great-West Financial in 1983 and was appointed president of its Retirement Services division in 2008, after serving as the unit’s senior vice president since its inception.

 

He continues as the senior officer responsible for all aspects of the firm’s defined contribution (DC) and defined benefit (DB) programs, overseeing the corporate, government, health care, nonprofit and institutional lines of business. Under Nelson’s leadership, Great-West Financial has grown from the 38th largest recordkeeper, in 1995, to a top-tier retirement plan provider that supplies 401(k), 401(a), 403(b) and 457 retirement plan services to 30,000 plans, representing 4.9 million participant accounts and $219.9 billion in assets as of December 31, 2013.

 

Per PLANSPONSOR’s 2013 Recordkeeping Survey, Great-West Financial is now the fourth largest recordkeeper in terms of total recordkeeping participants; seventh largest by total recordkeeping assets; largest 457 plan provider; and ninth largest in terms of total 401(k) and 403(b) recordkeeping assets.

 

Outside of the recordkeeping platform, Nelson has also led the development of the company’s multimanager, open architecture, multi-glide-path target-date funds (TDFs) and its Retirement Income Control Panel offering. He has served as president of the board of directors of The SPARK Institute and has been a member of the National Association of Government Defined Contribution Administrators (NAGDCA) since 1985.

 

Nelson is a graduate of Whitman College with a degree in chemistry and economics.

 

“Charlie has grown the retirement plan group at Great-West from an also-ran into an industry leader, by virtue of a tireless commitment to quality and service, all at a reasonable cost. He has a vision for what a recordkeeper should offer to advisers, plan sponsors and participants, and he has made that vision a reality,” said Alison Cooke Mintzer, editor-in-chief of PLANSPONSOR.
Products March 6, 2014

Actionable Information Creates Higher Savings

Four years after the launch of its Lifetime Income Analysis experience, participants in Putnam Investments-administered 401(k) plans continue to take significant steps forward in increasing their level of retirement preparedness.
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During 2013, Putnam found that of the participants who used the firm’s proprietary Lifetime Income Analysis Tool (see “Putnam Introduces Retirement Income Calculator”), 35% made deferral changes, and of those, 76% chose to increase their savings rate by an average of 25%.

“This data tells plan sponsors that deferral rates can be improved if we move beyond the traditional view of participant balances and investments, Edmund F. Murphy III, head of Defined Contribution at Putnam Investments, tells PLANSPONSOR.

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The Boston-based Murphy says critical factors include putting retirement savings into the same monthly income context that people use to manage their financial life, making it easy to understand tradeoffs, and making it simple for participants to change their savings rates. “Context and simplicity will help drive additional savings,” he adds.

Results were noticeably more pronounced among plan participants who also used Putnam’s Health Cost Estimator, a feature of the Lifetime Income Analysis Tool, which provides an estimate of how much future income will be needed to cover health care costs in retirement. Those who used the Health Cost Estimator and made a deferral rate change, increased their 401(k) plan savings contributions from 7.7% to 9.9%—a 29% increase, and more than three percentage points over the industry average of 6.8%, as measured by the Plan Sponsor Council of America.

Murphy also notes that plan participants using the Putnam Lifetime Income experience to change their deferral rates, increased their savings by a much more significant magnitude—seven times more than participants who used other methods to change their contribution levels, such as by telephone.

The Putnam study analyzed the actions of more than 40,000 participants in Putnam retirement plans who used the Lifetime Income Analysis Tool during 2013, as well as more than 8,000 participants who accessed the Health Cost Estimator during the year.

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