Products September 19, 2017

Orion Announces Two New Offerings for Advisers

The firm has launched a prospect portal and now offers a depository for financial, legal and personal documents.
Reported by

Orion Advisor Services, a portfolio accounting service provider for financial advisers, announced it is now integrated with FutureVault, an information management platform.

With this new integration, Orion advisers can now offer their clients FutureVault’s Digital Collaborative Vault to securely deposit, store and manage important financial, legal and personal documents. FutureVault can help improve the sharing and fiduciary tracking of essential documents between Orion advisers and clients in addition to a client’s external network of trusted consultants (i.e. lawyers, accountants, insurance brokers, etc.), providing complete transparency and enhanced communication and collaboration.

Never miss a story — sign up for PLANADVISER newsletters to keep up on the latest retirement plan adviser news.

“FutureVault provides a unique opportunity for Orion advisers to deepen existing client relationships and build multi-generational ones,” says Eric Clarke, CEO, Orion Advisor Services. “FutureVault provides the security and organization that will not only bring quantifiable value to clients’ daily lives, but will also help Orion advisers differentiate their overall offering, streamline business processes, improve the robustness of their compliance regimes and ultimately enhance the overall client experience.”

Key features of the Digital Collaborative Vault include bank-grade security and privacy; optical character recognition (OCR) with smart-filing technology; and a pre-configured digital filing cabinet with a flexible infrastructure for folders, documents and document forms.

Additionally, Orion and Mineral Interactive, a digital design and marketing consultancy for advisers and adviser technology, announced they have partnered to launch the Orion Prospect Portal.

Orion’s Prospect Portal enhances transparency and eliminates the tedious onboarding process for advisers and prospective clients. It offers a streamlined view of the prospect account activity, helping advisers efficiently guide prospects through all the important details required to identify risk, qualify leads, and collect all key information necessary for new account creation. Designed for each firm’s unique workflow, the portal is customizable to the adviser’s onboarding process, complete with custom branding and design that can be integrated directly into any existing website.

Features offered by the portal include:

  • Personalized risk assessment: Integrated with third-party questionnaires and tools like Riskalyze, the portal provides embedded risk assessments and data capture, enabling advisers to efficiently measure suitability.
  • Secure file sharing: To provide absolute transparency and accessibility, the portal enables clients and advisers to share documents and other important files with file sharing applications (Box, Dropbox, and Citrix Sharefile supported).
  • Balance Sheet Integration: The portal enables advisers to capture and richly display clients’ net worth through a tight integration with Wealth Access, a platform that aggregates data feeds from more than 20,000 institutions.
  • Open Source websites delivered through WordPress: The dashboard is powered by WordPress and can be integrated with an adviser’s personal website. If advisers do not use Wordpress, Mineral can help them get a dedicated version of the prospect portal.

More information about Orion Advisor Services is at https://www.orionadvisor.com/.

Compliance September 19, 2017

Participant in Small Plan Files Excessive Fee Suit Against Voya

The lawsuit alleges that Voya charged the plan “an unreasonable asset-based fee of between 0.67% and 1.86% of the net assets invested in the various mutual funds offered as investment options.”
Reported by

A participant in the Cornerstone Pediatric Profit Sharing Plan has filed suit against Voya Financial and its subsidiary Voya Retirement Insurance and Annuity Company for violating the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) by the way it charged fees.

According to the complaint, the participant is bringing the lawsuit on behalf of the Cornerstone plan and all other similarly situated plans seeking the return of undisclosed and unreasonable asset-based fees charged by Voya for recordkeeping and administrative services.

Want the latest retirement plan adviser news and insights? Sign up for PLANADVISER newsletters.

In a statement, Voya Financial said, “Voya denies the plaintiff’s claims and we plan to vigorously defend this matter.”

The complaint cites a survey by NEPC, a firm that advises on health care institutions’ defined contribution (DC) plan assets, which found the median recordkeeping cost of 113 plans was $64 per participant. It alleges that as a result of Voya’s asset-based fees, in 2014 the plan paid $30,790 for recordkeeping services for 21 participants, translating to $1,466 per participant, and in 2015, the plan paid $34,568 for 19 participants, translating to $1,819 per participant. “VOYA’s fees are 36 times more than the reasonable amount of compensation that should have been charged to the Cornerstone Plan,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit alleges that Voya charged the Cornerstone plan “an unreasonable asset-based fee of between 0.67% and 1.86% of the net assets invested in the various mutual funds offered as investment options.” It goes on to say Voya concealed the true amount of its fees in disclosures to participants by adding its asset-based fees to the operating costs of the mutual funds.

The plaintiff extrapolates this to the $175,780,000 in retirement plan assets Voya had under management as of the end of June this year, and says based on the fees charged to the Cornerstone plan, Voya potentially earns more than $1 billion a year “in excessive compensation at the expense of the individual plans and their participants.”

The complaint also states that Cornerstone plan fiduciaries engaged in a prohibited transaction by entering into the Voya contract. However, it does not name any person or committee of the plan as defendants.

«