How Demographics Drive Design
WE’RE AFRAID DAVID GRIFFIN will ask us to hold hands and sing “Kum ba yah.”
“I see people find success with a lot of different approaches, in the mega-market, micro-market, wherever,” Griffin, Director of Institutional Retirement Plans with Atlanta Retirement Partners, breezily says. “We can all have success at the same time, which is exciting. It’s a rare business where you interact with your competition and learn from each other, and it benefits the industry as a whole.”
Griffin and the firm make an impact in all market sizes—and therefore have a heavy focus on retirement plan customization.
“We’ve got about 120 plans sponsors with whom we work, and they range from manufacturing to legal to doctor groups to engineers, and everything in between. The makeup of the group determines how we approach our wellness initiatives for that particular client.”
For those that engage with wellness initiatives, the firm develops programs that involve several different topics, ranging from home buying to how credit works to personal finance and student debt.
“There’s a menu of different items from which they can select, and from there we implement tailormade programs over a year or 18 months. We call them boot camps, and we survey employees before and after to see the impact on their participation rates, levels of financial stress and overall financial health,” Griffin says.
Claiming to be “very granular” with sponsors and participants, the team might observe that a 100-person engineering group with an average age of 30 has a high percentage of secondary degrees.
“We ask about the debt load of the employee group, and if it’s a topic that’s raised in enrollment conversations. Clients often say, ‘Yes, 40% of my group is within five years from being out of a postgraduate degree, and they have a pretty heavy debt burden.’ If we not only get them to understand how to pay down debt, but how to address all the other financial decisions in their early lives, that’s going to make a very, very significant impact on retention of those employees, something the employer soon realizes.”
While acknowledging there are only so many dollars that can be included in a benefits spend, it’s more than simply retirement and health care, Griffin says—it’s completely holistic.
“The employee feels the sponsor wants them to thrive in a way that mitigates financial stress overall, which is good for all aspects of their lives, both personally and professionally.”
Griffin introduces Jacqueline Deckman, whom he refers to as the “curator” of Atlanta Retirement Partners’ financial wellness offering, to explain the following case.
“One of the greatest advantages of effective plan design is that it can free the plan committee and advisor from having to continuously shoulder the old, boilerplate education mandates: enrollment, deferral increases, and diversification,” Deckman notes. “A great example is a 401(k) with a Qualified Automatic Contribution Arrangement (QACA), automatic enrollment at 6% and an annual 1% increase until a 10% deferral rate is achieved.”
Those automatically enrolled are invested in the plan’s QDIA—a target-date portfolio series—
and both participation and deferral rates are steadily climbing, with assets properly diversified.
“With the heavy lifting accomplished,” Deckman concludes, “we’ve been able to shift our educational focus to the plan’s retirement income offering, and financial wellness topics overall.”
David Griffin is Director of Institutional Retirement Plans with Georgia-based Atlanta Retirement Partners | LPL Financial.
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
