Retirement Practice Lead Eickman Departing QPA

Matthew Eickman, the national retirement practice leader for Qualified Plan Advisors, will leave the firm for a career in law, writing and public speaking starting this July, parent firm Prime Capital Investment Advisors announced Thursday.

After leaving PCIA, Eickman will be joining industry attorney and consultant Bonnie Treichel at her Endeavor Retirement, where he will be managing partner of Endeavor Law and chief content officer of Endeavor Retirement. In his new role, Eickman says he will drop his securities registration and no longer work as a financial adviser. Instead, he will consult and work with registered investment advisories, recordkeepers, third-party administrators and retirement providers on “thought leadership and fiduciary guidance that blends both the potential risk and ultimate rewards for bringing forward the solutions that participants need.”

PCIA is launching a national search for a successor in which Eickman will play a role, according to the firm. He joined joined PCIA in 2017 as director of ERISA services and became national retirement practice leader in 2020, most recently leading the firm’s financial wellness business, Financial Fitness for Life. The practice leader will maintain a relationship with PCIA by contributing educational resources and as a “source of thought leadership for the firm and within the retirement industry,” according to the announcement. 

Eickman says he is thankful for his time at PCIA in part because he sees it as pushing ahead with new solutions and ideas that can help participants meet their retirement goals—what he sees as the end goal of plan advisers even as they guide plan sponsor clients.

“Over the last decade, I have seen two sides to the coin when it comes to the willingness to implement solutions to the participants that need them,” Eickman says. “I’ve been fortunate at QPA because it’s a participant-driven fiduciary firm so the idea of bringing solutions to participants—whether it’s financial wellness or model portfolios or managed accounts or retirement income—I know they have always been comfortable doing that. But I also know in the wider community there has been some discomfort with those offerings …. and I want to work with people in the industry to discuss how to do that and do it safely.”

Scott Colangelo, chairman and managing partner at Prime Capital Investment Advisors, said in a statement: “Over the last decade, our firm has been ahead of the market when we launched CITs [Collective Investment Trusts], built a proprietary financial wellness platform, and worked with a consortium of industry leaders to bring in-plan retirement income to participants through Income America. Matthew has been a critical part of identifying what’s next in our industry and propelling our firm’s growth into a national leader in those areas. I know we’ll turn to him as we have for over a decade to advance innovative ideas when others’ fears hold them back.”

Prior to joining PCIA, Eickman had a private legal practice focused on employee benefits, representing clients in front of the Department of Labor, Internal Revenue Service, and Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. He is a member of the Employee Benefits Committee of the American Bar Association Tax Section, co-chair of the Defined Contribution Plans Subcommittee and vice chair of the Defined Contribution Lifetime Income Subcommittee.

“We are really excited to continue to grow the team at Endeavor Retirement and Endeavor Law in furtherance of our mission in the world of retirement to make more tools, training and resources available to all financial professionals,” Treichel,  founder and chief solutions officer at Endeavor Retirement, said via email. “We remain committed to ensuring advisers can bring timely, actionable and compliant resources to their plan sponsors. Matthew’s demonstrated expertise will help deliver on that commitment to clients and our financial services community.”   

Eickman says has enjoyed making complex regulations and issues in the retirement plan space simple for plan sponsors—now, he looks forward to doing that to a “much broader base.” He notes a piece he did recently with Treichel addressing concerns over using annuities as in-plan retirement income solutions.

“That paper is representative of a style of thought leadership and advocacy that I believe the marketplace is hungry for,” he says. “We acknowledge risk, but also acknowledge the complexity of risk, seek and identify solutions, and then find ways to meet those solutions. It’s a different way of looking at the world—instead of ‘why we can’t do this’ to ‘we need to do this and this is how we can do it safely.’”