Mark Temple

Mark Temple has worked on many sides of the retirement plan spectrum, delivering education, selling product, and advising plan sponsors. He began his career as a seminar speaker for the employee benefit and compensation consulting firm The Ayco Company. In the late ’80s, Temple was hired by State Street in Boston, which had just picked up the American Bar Association retirement plan. Tasked with managing—and answering the questions from—some of the nation’s largest law firms as part of that program really honed Temple’s qualified plan skills, he says. Leaving to become “employee number one” in First Albany’s retirement plans group, Temple took on the job of getting the bank’s retail brokerage sales force (about 300 people) to sell qualified plans. “To say it was a slow process is an understatement,” he recalls; however, over eight years, he enlisted a group of a couple dozen advisers who focused on, and eventually grew, retirement plan sales from $4 million in takeover assets to $500 million.

In 2000, when First Albany acquired the retail brokerage assets and correspondent relationships of First Albany, Temple stayed with First Albany and started a group called Corporate Services, selling institutional plans and products to investment banking and municipal banking customers. However, after “making presentations to CFOs who had forgotten more about cash management than I knew,” Temple decided to try something else, in 2003, first approaching First Albany about taking over some house accounts that did not transfer in the acquisition and, at the same time, reaching out to recordkeeper Invesmart about building them a New York presence. He used Invesmart’s B/D and RIA and spent half his time managing his book and half building that New York practice. However, Temple found himself drawn to the consultative selling, rather than the product side. After The Standard bought Invesmart in 2006, Temple says, he was allowed to take his clients and subsequently decided to make a move to National Retirement Partners (NRP). He officially became an affiliate firm of NRP, clearing through its broker/dealer, on October 1, 2007.

It may seem odd that, considering his average plan is about $18 million in assets, Temple says the majority of his new business comes from plans using a retail adviser. When he approaches a plan sponsor in those situations, he finds that the fact that he does not accept retail business is helpful, because he is able to convince the plan fiduciary that he will focus on helping them, while letting the retail broker keep rollovers or other personal assets.

Being a small shop (in addition to Temple, there is one account manager at the company), Temple leverages the NRP toolbox to help him deliver a full-service model to his clients. Acknowledging that his nonproprietary consulting approach is “not reinventing the wheel,” he says his delivery is sincere and that drawing on his experience from various perspectives allows him to help companies get the right plan designs. “At First Albany, we used to ask people to design for us their perfect solution,he says, “After doing that for years—you get to know what plan sponsors are looking for.”

Photo by Chris Ramirez