Retirement Industry People Moves

Betterment Expands Board of Advisors; Northern Trust Hires Two for Taft-Hartley Business; SSGA Names Head of Americas Institutional Partnership Sales; and more.

Betterment Expands Board of Advisors  

Tech-focused 401(k) provider Betterment for Business welcomes Judy Mares and Laraine McKinnon to its Board of Advisors. Each brings more than 20 years of experience in the defined contribution (DC) market to the table.

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

Mares served as deputy assistant secretary for Policy in the Employee Benefits Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) from 2013 until January 2017. While at the DOL, she was part of the team that designed the fiduciary rule as well as guidance on ESG investing. She’s also served as a chief investment officer for several Fortune 500 companies.

McKinnon spent more than two decades at BlackRock, where she most recently served as a retirement readiness strategist. McKinnon built and delivered DC tools and analytics to support senior finance and human resources executives as well as top financial advisers.

“We are thrilled to have Judy and Laraine join our Board of Advisors,” says Cynthia Loh, general manager of Betterment for Business. “Their deep expertise in the defined contribution space and strong advocacy for retirees will help further our mission to empower people to take control of their financial futures and make the most of everything they earn.” 

NEXT: Northern Trust Hires Two for Taft-Hartley Business

Northern Trust Hires Two for Taft-Hartley Business

Northern Trust Asset Management welcomes two industry veterans to its sales team serving the Public funds and Taft-Hartley community.

Tamara Doi Beck, director of Public Funds and Taft-Hartley plans, will be based out of Denver and serve the West Coast. Ashley Hartman Alson, director of Public Funds and Taft-Hartley-plans, will be based out of Dallas and serve the Southern Midwest and Southeast regions.

Both specialize in public, corporate, endowment and foundations plans. Most recently, Beck was a managing director responsible for new business development for such plans at Janus Capital Group. She also served as director of business development for LMCG Investments and senior vice president for Neuberger Berman. Alson also comes from Janus Capital Group, where she served public, corporate, endowment and foundation plans as a client executive. Previously, she was a senior relationship manager for Morgan Stanley Investment Management, focusing on large corporate liquidity sales. She also held several roles at JPMorgan.

“Tamara and Ashley bring extensive capital markets expertise, client relationship management and new business development skills to an already strong client facing team within Northern Trust Asset Management,” says Bob Parise, practice lead for Public Funds and Taft-Hartley.

NEXT: SSGA Names Head of Americas Institutional Partnership Sales

SSGA Names Head of Americas Institutional Partnership Sales

State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) has named Robert McGowan as head of Americas Institutional Partnership Sales. In this newly created position, McGowan will be responsible integrating sub-advisory, OCIO partnerships and DC platform sales.

McGowan brings more than 15 years of sales and management experience across the sub-advisory and financial institutions channels. He’s served as head of Third Party Retail and Financial Institutions Group at UBS. He’s also held various leadership positions throughout UBS and Deutsche Asset Management.

He will report to Kevin Smith, head of Sales for Americas ICG. He will lead his efforts alongside Smith; Kelly Cavagnaro, head of OCIO Partnerships; Greg Porteous, head of Defined Contribution Intermediary Strategy; and Tony Scola, head of U.S. Sub-Advisory.

NEXT: MassMutual Rebrands

MassMutual Rebrands

After operating in the industry for more than a century, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company has unveiled a new brand in an attempt to better reflect its core values and the idea of interdependence.

“Since 1851, MassMutual has been guided by our founding principle—we are people coming together to look out for one another,” says Gareth Ross, MassMutual chief digital and customer experience officer. “We know people are inherently reliant on one another, whether that’s at home, in the workplace or in the community. Our new positioning celebrates these relationships, underscoring that when we depend on each other, we are not only more secure—but life is also happier and more fulfilling.”

Jennifer Halloran, MassMutual head of brand and advertising adds, “Much has changed in the past decade—we live our lives differently, connecting on social media and depending on each other at all stages of life. As we took a close look at the key attributes that distinguish us from our competitors, we saw this as not only an opportunity to communicate who we are, but to also help more Americans with holistic financial solutions at a time they need the help the most.”

MassMutual points to research indicating that nearly one-third (32%) of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 now live at home with their parents, and only one-third of Baby Boomers are confident they will have enough money to last through their retirement. In addition, a vast amount of Americans, particularly those that belong to Generation X are taking care of both parents and children.

Moreover, Millennials are the largest living generation and the biggest group in the workforce, but they are burdened with more than $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, according to MassMutual. Furthermore, median middle class income fell 4% in the past decade.

“This is just the beginning of the next chapter in MassMutual’s long journey of helping people secure their future and protect the ones they love,” says Ross.

NEXT: Bank of America Merrill Lynch Expands Retirement Business

Bank of America Merrill Lynch Expands Retirement Business

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has hired Lisa Margeson to lead the newly formed Retirement Client Experience & Communications group, which is responsible for engaging both personal and institutional retirement clients along with plan participants.

Led by Margeson, the team will oversee the firm’s various offerings including its financial wellness program, benefits online portal and Life Priorities framework. Margeson brings years of industry experience to her new role.Previously, she served as head of Marketing and Creative Services for Retirement Solutions at Voya Financial. She joined Voya (formerly ING US) through the firm’s purchase of CitiStreet, where she served as chief marketing officer at the time of the acquisition. Margeson also spent nine years at Fidelity Investments as director of institutional bank marketing. Prior to Fidelity, she worked as an account representative at a Boston-based financial planning and investment management firm where she held a variety of client and investment portfolio service positions.

Margeson earned a bachelor’s degree in math and economics from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and a master’s degree in business administration from Boston University. 

NEXT: The Standard Hires Retirement Consultant

The Standard Hires Retirement Consultant

Ryan Racine has joined The Standard as a retirement plan consultant for its Central Sales Region. Based in Tampa, he has more than a decade of experience in the financial services industry behind him. Prior to joining The Standard, Racine was the regional sales manager for the southeast region at Aspire.

Racine received the Chartered Retirement Plans Specialist designation in 2015 and Professional Plan Consultant credential in 2016. He was also recognized in 2016 as one of NAPA’s 100 Top Wholesalers.

“Ryan has been recognized in the industry for his ability to partner well with advisers and plan sponsors,” says Rita Taylor-Rodriguez, regional sales director for The Standard’s Central Sales Region. “He brings energy, experience and perspective to this position. We are excited to have him on board.”

Plan Providers Emphasize Need for Nimble Tech, Greater Scale

Retirement plan recordkeepers describe plans to dramatically ramp up scale and double down on new technologies that support efficient growth and client service.

Chad Parks, founder and CEO of Ubiquity Retirement and Savings, is not the kind of business leader that likes to keep his company’s goals and aspirations hidden, nor does he shy away from acknowledging challenges the firm and its competition face.

Speaking recently with PLANADVISER, Parks offered a frank and refreshing take on the defined contribution (DC) plan recordkeeping marketplace, with a particular focus on the issues facing providers, like Ubiquity, specializing in serving small- and micro-plans. For Ubiquity, the current outlook is optimistic, Parks says, but there is also an understanding that fundamental challenges are on the horizon.  

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

At a very high level all recordkeepers are facing real pressure from fee compression, he observes, and the perception, which he calls unfounded, of the increasing “commoditization” of all manner of recordkeeping services. Related to both of these points is the demand to constantly improve and reassess technology offerings and other touch-points for plan sponsor clients, who are being driven by concerns about their own fiduciary liability to demand more than ever from their recordkeepers—and at lower price points.

Parks says he is proud that his firm has been able to continue to grow through these challenging conditions. 

“A lot of people will tell you that there is no way for the providers to continue to make money, long term, serving this space,” Parks says, “and so they do not even attempt to work with small plans. Our counterargument is, that’s almost right, but you have to be able to scale up on the provide side and get to that large and sustainable number of small plans. It’s not a get-rich-quick business, from that perspective. You make a little bit of money on a lot of plans—that’s the strategy.”

Parks adds that, even with the strong barriers to entry in the DC recordkeeping space, there is now more competition than ever. “We welcome that,” Parks says. “The new entrants know, like we do, that there is a market here that deserves top quality service. Other people are recognizing that and it’s a good thing, because no single provider can solve the retirement readiness problem.”

NEXT: Big plans and big challenges 

Parks suggests one source of his optimism about Ubiquity’s future is “the interesting path we have taken on the technology picture.”

At the start of the company’s lifetime Ubiquity leveraged an early generation SunGuard platform, then moved on to a provider called InvestLink, before returning to use Relius, another version of the SunGuard product “that had grown up a little bit,” as Parks puts it. Throughout this evolution, he explains, Ubiquity had also updated its own proprietary platform solution more than a few times.

“Even with all of the third-party solutions and our own in-house work, we were never quite satisfied with what we had on the back end,” Parks says. “So back in 2012 and 2013 we started the work of fully redesigning our next generation platform … to really start from scratch using fresh architecture and brand new data technology. Making it API compatible was especially important to facilitate the sharing of data behind the scenes, for example.”

At the same time this internal development work was going on, the firm “looked one more time at everything that was available right now in the marketplace.”

“We even went deep with two licensed platform providers into the RFP process,” Parks says. “But in the end, either their systems were too complicated and couldn’t be simplified for our approach that we feel works well for small- and micro-plans, or there was not enough under the hood to make us feel fully confident in what our offering would look like.”  

And so finally the decision was made “to close the gap on our own and to go 100% proprietary.” This added about 18 months to the technology development cycle, Parks admits, “but it opened up a whole new path forward for us.”

Parks says the firm is now offering its proprietary platform as a licensed solution for independent third-party administrators (TPAs) and recordkeepers “who are suffering with limitations in their own platforms the way we did.” Obviously the licensing fees benefit the business, but Parks suggests this expanding business line is also about “fostering cooperative competition.”

“We believe we have created a great platform and we want others to be able to use it and increase the reach beyond what we could ever do on our own,” he concludes.

NEXT: Ascensus also sounds optimistic note 

It is interesting to juxtapose Parks’ commentary with those of Raghav Nandagopal, executive vice president of corporate development and mergers/acquisitions at Ascensus, who also recently sat down with PLANADVISER to talk shop.

Nandagopal says Ascensus’ growth strategy also very much involves either developing or acquiring the best technology possible. Beyond this, “our growth strategy is predicated on a few fairly straightforward things.”

First, Ascensus is “closely focused on expansion in our core market segments, which are the DC recordkeeping space and the 529 college savings plan administration area. We are seeing a lot of growth opportunity and acquisition opportunities here.” The theme is that fees associated with these business lines have been crunched in recent years, and so growing significantly in scale is seen as a necessity for protecting profitability. And what is the most direct way to build scale while maintaining quality? Buy businesses that are already well established but are smaller and even more threatened by the fee compression.  

“Expanding health solutions capabilities and tying this into retirement solutions is also a very important focus and growth area for us right now,” Nandagopal adds. “Health savings accounts, especially, we feel optimistic about.”

The final growth opportunity Ascensus is focused on “is the broader benefits administration space and tying all of this together for the employer.”

“If you broadly think about where the recordkeeping and TPA space is going, there is a demand for a holistic approach and to take advantage of the adjacencies that already exist between retirement plans, health plans and college savings,” Nandagopal says. “If you are an employer today and you are thinking about what you can do to recruit and retain top talent, what can you do? You can think about wages, and then you can think about benefits, retirement benefits and support for health care. More and more you are seeing a focus on student loan support and student loan payment administration from payroll. Tying all of these things together is a growth opportunities for providers like us.”

Like Ubiquity, Ascensus is optimistic about opportunities to join services with other providers to maximize the deliverable for the end clients on the ground. So for example, Ascensus is right now rolling out a collaboration with Morgan Stanley, called ClearFit, through which Morgan Stanley does the investment component, taking on fiduciary 3(38) service, while the Ascensus team continues to do the recordkeeping and administration activity. 

“This is the time for us to go to the market and work with various institutional partners to address the retirement needs of small-business employees, and other market segments as well,” he concludes. “We very much expect to continue this focus on asking, what are the other tools and technologies we could provide to the ecosystem that can help everyone manage their businesses better?”

«

 

You’ve reached your free article limit.

  You’re out of free articles!! 

Subscribe to a free PW newsletter - get free online access!

 Don’t leave before subscribing! 

If you’re a subscriber, please login.