2022 PLANADVISER Award Season is Here

2022 Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year

As we have in the past years, PLANADVISER is soliciting your help in identifying the best retirement plan advisers in the country. If you work with or for, or know of, a great plan adviser or plan adviser team, please help us recognize the best in the business.

Nominations for the 2022 PLANADVISER Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year awards are now being accepted in six categories:

• Plan Sponsor Service
• Plan Participant Service
• Mentorship
• Efforts in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• Community Impact and Giving Back
• Closing the Coverage Gap

The first two award categories will be open for nominations from plan sponsors only, while adviser partners across the industry—including recordkeepers, asset managers, advisers, product providers and more—may submit nominations in the other four; self-nomination will continue to be prohibited.

These new award categories, we believe, provide more context for advisers looking to compete and be recognized, instead of their just being fitted into a category based on the number of people in their office, with no set metrics about what makes one adviser rise above another in firms of the same size.

Award recipients across all categories will be honored at the inaugural PLANADVISER Industry Leaders Awards on May 3, 2022 in New York City. Finalists and winners for Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year awards will be featured online at PLANADVISER.com and in PLANADVISER magazine. Previous Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year winners can be viewed at https://www.planadviser.com/awards/.

The deadline for the 2021 Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year awards nominations is February 22, 2022. Questions can be directed to awards@issmediasolutions.com.

The nomination form is available here: https://my.reviewr.com/s2/site//2022_RPAY_Nominations.

2022 Top Retirement Plan Advisers

The other recognition we have given out is the annual PLANADVISER Top 100 Retirement Plan Advisers of the Year. This has been awarded to the top 100 retirement plan advisers and teams based on quantitative measures such as the most plans and assets under advisement (AUA). For the 2021 list we made a significant change, limiting how large a team we’d consider—eliminating national-type firms that traditionally had met the eligibility for a Mega Team. However, having reviewed responses and gathered feedback, we are going to continue to change this quantitative recognition.

For 2022, there will no longer be the recognition of teams in the Top Adviser. We will instead limit entries to individual advisers. Advisers who are part of a team can supply their entry statistics as a fraction of their team’s figures. For example, an adviser on a five-adviser team that collectively advises on $1 billion might claim $200 million in AUA.

This will, of course, also mean that we likely cannot limit the list to just 100 advisers—when we included teams, the “Top 100” represented more than 340 advisers—and we don’t have a set number-target quite yet. For the 2022 what we are now calling PLANADVISER Top Retirement Plan Adviser list, we will still be reviewing quantitative metrics, including AUA, percentage of revenue from retirement plan assets/types, and number of plans under advisement. We encourage all advisers interested in competing to submit information, and we’ll determine the final number after reviewing the entries.

Advisers who wish to be considered for the Top Retirement Plan Adviser can access the survey here.

The deadline for survey responses is February 18.