Client Service April 27, 2021

Advisers Giving Back: Sean Patton

Raised by his family to believe in the importance of giving back, Patton now leads various important efforts in the Rochester community, from supporting breast cancer research advocates to helping run an adventure camp for children and young adults with disabilities.
Reported by

Art by James Albon


Sean Patton has been featured in a number of PLANADVISER stories lately, most recently in a feature published in our latest print edition in which he discusses the effort to expand retirement plan advisory practices into new lines of business, including financial wellness and health care-focused consulting.

Just last week, Patton revealed that his Rochester, New York-based advisory firm, Westminster Consulting, would become part of OneDigital, adding to what has already been a record-setting pace of adviser industry mergers and acquisitions (M&As) so far in 2021.

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANADVISERdash daily newsletter.

Beyond these topics, Patton also recently took time to speak with PLANADVISER for our Advisers Giving Back Profile series. In the conversation, recounted and edited for clarity below, Patton explains where his passion for giving back comes from and offers some suggestions for his industry peers who may be thinking about giving back to their local community in some way. (Spoiler alert, he says go for it!)

Like the other advisers profiled in this series, Patton feels compelled to pay forward his good fortune and to use the skill sets he has developed as an adviser to make the Rochester community a better place for everyone, especially those who are battling breast cancer and those caring for family and friends with disabilities.

PLANADVISER: We are always looking out for advisers who are involved in important causes in their communities. During our planning discussions for a recent webinar, you spoke about various projects and groups you are engaged with, including the Rochester Rotary, Camp Haccamo and the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester. What does giving back mean to you?

Sean Patton: Well, my father was a social worker and he was also always giving back, beyond the work he did for his day job. Additionally, I went to a Catholic high school, and community service was a big part of what we had to do to succeed and even to graduate. Eventually, when I graduated from college and got into the working world, I started giving back right away. It was the right thing to do. At first it was only with time, right, because I didn’t have any money.

I think it was a client of mine who introduced me to the Rochester Rotary. It was a great way to get to know the community we had just built a house in, while giving back. I have been involved with Rotary in different ways over the years. I became the president of my local Rotary before eventually becoming the president of the board of Camp Haccamo, which is a camp we run for children and adults with disabilities in the summers.

As I got older and had my own kids, my involvement shifted, and I helped the local Rotary oversee the foundation for what was then Camp Haccamo, and which has since become associated with the Sunshine Camp. Today, I’m helping them to prudently oversee a few million dollars of resources, and it’s actually very similar work to what I do for some of my clients.

Stepping back, giving back is the right and moral thing to do, and it does connect you with the community in a deeper way—personally. It’s not about business, it’s about community building.

PLANADVISER: Have you been able to leverage your business skills while giving back? So many of the advisers in our space have just the right skill sets to step up and offer their knowledge and their charisma to some great causes.

Patton: Yeah, I think that’s right. We can repurpose the skills we use every day, just without the retainer attached to it, frankly. The skills I use in running Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester’s golf tournament are definitely related to the skills I use in my practice. You’re negotiating prices for vendors and venues. You’re negotiating with sponsors, and, at the end of the day, it’s about maximizing the money raised—not having the coolest golf tournament.

PLANADVISER: Tell us about Camp Haccamo and the Sunshine Camp.

Patton: I’d love to. Camp Haccamo has been around for ages. It is a local institution in the town I live in, called Penfield, New York, and it’s always been supported by our local Rotary chapter.

Camp Haccamo was an interesting space historically, in that it was plopped down between a manufacturer and a lower-income residential community. I say that because we were basically landlocked and it meant we were somewhat limited in the programming we could do. But even then, it brought amazing smiles to the faces of the kids and young adults who came to the camp. They came for a week and it gave their families a respite from their care routine for a week. They got to enjoy a pool, hiking and games, but longer term, we felt we could do something better.

The Sunshine campus had also been around for a long time as well, run by the ‘big bad’ Rochester Rotary, as we saw it at the time. A little history here: For some 30 years, the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament had a stop in Rochester, and all the money raised by that tournament went to the Sunshine campus, which was doing the same thing Haccamo did, just on a much bigger scale and on a huge piece of quality land.

So we basically decided to sell our piece of land and put those proceeds into the Sunshine foundation and become one big happy family in serving those with disabilities in Monroe County. I sat on the board as president of Camp Haccamo as that whole evolution happened, and we now have a fabulous piece of land for these kids, young adults and now adults as well.

PLANADVISER: Do you have a personal connection to the breast cancer research and advocacy issue? We all do, as human beings, of course, but has your family been personally impacted?

Patton: Yeah, it’s an interesting backstory. Initially, a friend of mine came to me around about 2000 and said he wanted to work with me on a charitable event. He had family members battling breast cancer, and at the time, the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester was still in its infancy.

I lost both of my grandmothers to breast cancer. I had a wife at the time and I now have a daughter, so it was a no-brainer to get involved. This group does spectacular work in a lot of different service areas. It’s been so meaningful to support this work. These ladies are bootstrapping these amazing programs at the local level, from doing critical advocacy in Albany to providing sick people with yoga classes to creating scholarships for doctors doing cancer research. It’s incredible.

The Markets April 19, 2021

How Advisers Can Evaluate Stable Value Investments

Experts say they should consider performance, risk mitigation, team and process—as well as how the accounts are managed, how assets are protected and what termination rights they offer to sponsors.
Reported by

Art by Giulia Sagramola


While retirement plan advisers might dismiss stable value investments as not being relevant to retirement plans, they should know that assets in these vehicles are continuing to climb.

Stable value account assets rose 12% last year to $906 billion, to now comprise 10% of all defined contribution (DC) plan assets, and 63% of plans offer them, according to the Stable Value Investment Association (SVIA).

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

Perhaps even more compelling is SVIA data that shows the annualized return from 2000 to 2020 for stable value was 4.22% and 5.25% for stocks.

Patricia Selim, head of stable value investments in Vanguard’s fixed income group and chairwoman of SVIA’s communications and education committee, says the reason stable value has been able to deliver such high returns is that it invests in fixed-income strategies with a duration typically longer than money market funds; money market funds’ duration is usually 60 days, and stable value duration ranges from two to six years, Selim says.

Robert Lawton, president, Lawton Retirement Plan Consultants, says a 401(k) investment fund lineup should offer “a high-quality, extremely low risk option for those participants who are close to retirement, scared of volatile markets or are conservative investors.”

As such, what do retirement plan advisers need to know about stable value funds, and how can they evaluate them?

To start, it’s important to understand they are available in three forms, says Gina Mitchell, president of SIVA. The first is individually managed accounts, where the assets are owned and managed for a specific plan’s participants. The plan sponsor can terminate their association with the stable value fund at market value at any time, Mitchell says, adding that other wind-down options may also be available.

Then there are pooled funds, typically offered by a bank or trust companies. They combine the assets of unaffiliated plans into one large group. Their termination rights are more limited; they can be terminated at book value after a deferral period, which is option called a put option, Mitchell says.

In both of these cases, the protection for the assets is provided either through synthetic contracts, separate account contracts or insurance company general account guaranteed investment contracts (GICs).

Stable value funds are also managed as insurance company general and separate accounts, offered and guaranteed by a single insurance company. They offer protection through a contract offered directly to plans. Sponsors can negotiate what kind of termination rights they want. Termination at market value, wind-down and/or put options may be available, Mitchell says.

“Typically, in the individual and pooled funds, you have more transparency into the underlying holdings,” she says. “They will define fees and exit terms well, and provide additional diversification through the wrap contract in that they will generally by wrapped by several different insurance or financial institutions. An insurance company doesn’t offer such transparency, and the fees are spread to the underlying investments. Hence, the fee is expressed as a spread. The exit terms have a guaranteed return floor greater than zero. These are all several factors for advisers to consider when assessing stable value funds.”

James Martielli, head of investment solutions in the institutional investor group at The Vanguard Group, says his firm views retirement plans as achieving four main goals: basic income, discretionary income, contingency income and legacies. “Stable value can give retirees peace of mind that they can meet those contingency goals, such as unexpected expenses.”

When selecting a stable value option, Martielli says it is important for advisers and sponsors to assess a fund’s performance, risk mitigation, team and process.

“Taking a look at performance is as important as understanding the market to book value,” he says. “Sponsors need to look at what the overall market value of the bond is relative to its book value. It should be higher than its peers. By risk mitigation, I mean looking at the underlying credit quality of the bonds. Some stable value products may generate higher returns but take on higher risk. Look for an experienced team doing this for quite some time and using a robust process. These are all important criteria to look at because not every stable value fund is the same.”

«