Retirement Plan Consulting Services

/Retirement Plan Consulting Services
Retirement Plan Consulting Services 2019-01-22T20:11:23-05:00

Retirement Plan Consulting Services

Requests for Proposal (RFP)

Plan/Service Provider Benchmarking

Duty to Monitor

As a Plan Sponsor, you can sometimes face the occasional project or special request that needs to be completed to fulfill your fiduciary duty to your company retirement plan.  Blackwood is happy to serve as an unbiased third party evaluator for you.  Some consulting services we provide include:

Requests for Proposal (RFP)

Periodically, circumstances may warrant you to conduct a thorough analysis of your adviser or other plan service provider.  Typically, a full RFP is required to spearhead a comprehensive due diligence process to ensure your current adviser/service provider is doing an adequate job or to find a new adviser/service provider altogether.  RFPs can be labor intensive and overwhelming.  We provide an RFP solution to vet candidates for you at a reasonable cost.

Plan/Service Provider Benchmarking

Benchmarking comes in two flavors, generally:

  • Fee and service benchmarking
  • Plan design and demographic benchmarking

Plan Sponsors are required to know the fees they are paying for the services received and if those are “reasonable” for the situation.  The only way to do this is through Benchmarking.  This includes assessing your adviser’s fees and services.  If you fully trust your adviser team, you can rely solely on them to provide a benchmarking report on their fees and services.  However, it could prove to be beneficial to periodically have an unbiased third party review this.

Duty to Monitor

As a Plan Sponsor, you have a “duty to monitor” all of your service providers with respect to your company retirement plan.   Without industry expertise or adequate resources, this could prove to be difficult for you.  This duty to monitor usually focuses around things like:

  • Reasonableness of fees
  • Fulfilling service requirements
  • Reviewing any conflicts of interest a service provider might have
  • Assessing reasonableness of investments or investment assumptions
  • Determining if a “prudent process” exists with respect to managing the plan