A dashboard to seamlessly integrate relevant RFP tools and features?
It invariably makes the 401k advisor more efficient, effective and therefore successful, and it’s the thinking behind a strategic partnership between GRP Advisor Alliance and BidMoni, a registered investment advisor that provides technology to the retirement plan market.
Announced Tuesday, the companies call it “the first end-to-end solution that pairs best in nation pricing, products and industry expertise with a unified dashboard,” claiming it will give financial advisory firms a competitive edge in the retirement plan space.
“Everything is moving to, ‘How can I take all of these different moving parts of a 401k and have them in one place that makes sense for the sort of things clients need?’” BidMoni Co-Founder and Co-CEO Stephen Daigle said. “I’ve been an advisor, and it’s hard to build technology when you don’t know what that process looks like. So, we’ve built the tool to help advisors grow and more efficiently interact with plan sponsors, but also to automate the monitoring of an existing book that lets them scale in a compliant manner.”
The platform will enable advisors to compare bids between dozens of the country’s top retirement plan providers. It will also analyze proposals so plan sponsors and financial advisors can determine the best plan, document the entire process to stay compliant, and automatically monitor plans on an ongoing basis.
“We wanted a 5500-prospecting tool, which we would make available to our advisors,” GRPAA’s Bill Chetney, Jr. explained when asked about the deal’s genesis. “We were referred to BidMoni by INTRUST, and when I started chatting with Stephen, I learned they are much more than just a 5500 tool. They also have this other core model of RFP benchmarking technology. That’s where the conversation started, and they’re now integrating our other GRPAA value-adds with it, which is really great.”
Compelling customization
Noting that Bidmoni has reached out to GRPAA’s marketplace and customized the offerings to each individual advisor practice, Chetney called the technology compelling, “because, on the RFP portion, you can actually weight it to what the client wants. If financial wellness is something they think is important, for example, you can make sure it’s included. So, it’s intuitive and I think they’ve done a great job.”
Typically, advisory firms might buy one of several a 5500 databases, Daigle adds, and once they find a particular plan prospect, they have to then go to a completely different system to figure out how to collect proposals.
“Once they win the business, they then have to go to yet another completely different system,” he said. “We’re different in that our entire goal was to put everything under one umbrella and have them speak with one another. No manual data is moving back and forth. The advisor can enter the system, find the plan, connect with the sponsor, find the issues that exist in the plan, present that data to the sponsor, and then automate the monitoring and benchmarking.”
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.
