Leaders of the Pack

In the winter of 2010, we introduced PLANADVISER’s Top 100 Advisers, a recognition of the most successful advisers drawn from the nominations for PLANSPONSOR’s Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year award. Although we used to publish that list the winter before the award, we found it confusing because of the different year dates. Therefore, this year we are aligning the Top 100 list and the award to be named in the same year. Beginning here, you can see our list of adviser standouts from those entering the 2012 PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year process—yes, there are 100 individuals or teams spread among those pages. Just how successful are these Top 100 Advisers? Collectively, the individual advisers represent about $33 billion in retirement plan assets (almost double the 2010 list), while the teams on the list collectively serve just shy of $150 billion in plan assets (a 30% increase over 2010’s teams).

Congratulations to all those who have made the list: Your success in working with qualified (and nonqualified­) retirement programs is duly noted. I encourage our readers to stay tuned to our planadviser.com website, where we will be rolling out a section offering profiles of these 100 advisers and an interactive, sortable version of the lists.

On a recent trip to London, I was again reminded how intertwined various countries around the globe are. For example, in financial reports about the markets, it is not surprising to know that U.S. markets reacted a certain way to particular foreign occurrences, or vice versa. Increasingly, retirement is becoming intertwined as well, as countries around the world must come to grips with the implications of aging populations. While America might be seen as a leader in many areas, retirement isn’t one of them. In fact, last October, the Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index was released, ranking 16 countries’ pension systems based on their adequacy, sustainability and integrity. The United States received a grade of C, and ranked 10th. With that ranking and an eye toward the globalization of retirement, our feature story, “Meeting of the Global Minds,” offers five suggestions to improve the U.S. retirement system, specifically offering ideas from other countries about how to make such changes.

How do you find new clients? What are your plans for growing your client base in 2012? Although much has been made of social media, only about one in eight advisers use that method to obtain new clients, according to the 2011 PLANADVISER Adviser Experience survey. In actuality, the most popular tool for marketing an adviser’s services is cold calling, cited by nearly half of retirement plan advisers. Whatever your favored method, “Great Aspirations” offers some food for thought as you rethink or revamp your marketing for 2012.

Professionals involved in all aspects of the retirement business are bracing for impact from new Department of Labor regulations that will finally arrive in 2012 (many of them, at least). While it is necessary to prepare for these new regulations, a majority of advisers are still unaware of some of the changes that were brought about by the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (PPA). The PPA involved many things, one of them being clarification and support for cash balance plans. As one adviser put it, cash balance plans were the “wild wild West” of the retirement industry before the PPA, but since its passing, there is much more clarity and consistency with how they work. Advisers and cash balance plan providers are saying that the PPA has made CB plans more user-friendly for business owners to implement; the key ingredient added by the PPA was flexibility. The growth in these plans over the last few years has been tremendous. You can find out more about these plans (and for what companies they might be a good fit) in “A Flexible DB Plan?”. 

Those features, as well as a guideline to writing a news release in our Learner’s Permit section, and our columnists Steff Chalk and Marcia Wagner, await you in this issue. Happy reading and a very belated happy new year!