In late 2021, retirement plan fiduciary experts Jason Roberts and Pete Swisher formed Group Plan Systems (GPS), a joint venture “to serve as an independent, operational fiduciary for group plan arrangements.”
On Tuesday, the high-profile PEP partners announced they now have participating employers, and it’s live this month.
“We call the first PEP ‘GPS Navigator,’ and the record keeper is July Business Services, “Roberts said at the Wealth@wor(k) conference in Las Vegas. “It was designed in consultation with the PRI member firms that expressed interest in having a PEP solution for their clients.”
Roberts said the PEP’s structure is unique in that it is a single plan with multiple investment sleeves, which are filled by RIAs, banks, and broker-dealers through their corporate RIAs. With the latest launch and four others in the works, they’re confident in their growth prospects.
“We are the architects and serve as the pooled plan provider, but we are not involved in the distribution, which is another differentiator, in that we do not hire the 3(38),” Roberts added. “We leave that in the hands of the employer—they hire us, and they hire the 3(38). We, therefore, don’t have a conflict in hiring a 3(38) that’s going to give us more distribution than another 3(38).”
It also means they don’t have the power to fire the 3(38)s, whereas many of the other pooled plan provider models require they hire and fire the 3(38)s.
“This is unique; we have not seen a PEP where you have sleeves or the benefit of the scale your participating employers have, but also the benefit of other firms that add their employers to the same PEP.”
When asked about the product’s unique structure, Roberts said he and Swisher “feel like we’ve been training for this our whole lives.”
“If you dig into the benefits to the employer—and we’re really here to solve plan sponsor issues—then the PEP is a superior vehicle. It statutorily shifts 90% of the administrative duties away from reluctant, accidental fiduciaries to people like us who have been training for it their whole lives.”
The team has expertise in plan compliance, plan operations, internal audits, Swisher’s operational details, and Robert’s interpretation of legal issues and contract reviews.
“I tell a lot of people we have a very rigorous and regimented due diligence process, from which we then use to determine how we’re going to operate a plan,” Roberts concluded. “There’s no black box. You can hand-pick or draft your committee from a pool of independent professionals with that expertise. That’s what we’ve done.”
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.
