Better than Basic Fee Benchmarking | PlanFees

During this session, we will give you a comprehensive overview of PlanFees Fee Benchmarking System—a powerful assistant designed to provide clarity and strategic insights into fee benchmarking for retirement plans. We will also have our Director of New Business Development show you the ropes on how to leverage PlanFees to retain your current clients and impress your prospects. The actual system overview will include:

• Prism is the industry’s most cutting-edge and easy to use benchmarking tool that allows you to put together a revealing comparison of recordkeeping, TPA, investment, and advisory fee in under two minutes. 
• Prism365 is a comprehensive advisor fee and services benchmarking report that helps justify advisor fee and determine appropriate service level based on plan size.
• RFP Express is the newest live-bid benchmarking report that allows advisors to gather real quotes from recordkeepers in seconds, saving you hours and even days of time!

In this presentation the topic of fee benchmarking is covered at length including the importance of this process, what to benchmark, how to do it, and RPAG’s role as it relates to benchmarking.

A good starting place is to benchmark a plans fee on an annual basis through one of RPAG's benchmarking solutions. The total cost as well as the breakdown should be calculated. Prospects are always interested in how a plan can save money and by highlighting lower record keeping costs, advisor fees, etc. an advisor can win new business.

The next question asked is what should be benchmarked? All costs associated with managing investments (which are always paid for by plan participants) otherwise known as investment fees should be benchmarked. Additionally, admin fees especially record keeping and TPA fees should be documented. Another key detail to document is how those fees are being paid for (is it the plan sponsor? participants?). Finally, advisory fees should be tracked as well to determine how appropriate they are. There are a variety of other factors that can impact overall pricing such as service requirements or participant education costs. Considering how a plan matches a provider’s capabilities are key when evaluating what recordkeeper to go with.

Once what to benchmark is established it is important to know how to create these reports with RPAG. RPAG has a provider analysis report which is a robust tool intended to be used every 3-5 years for a formal quote from different record keepers based on various parameters. For annual benchmarking, the Prism and Prism365 tools are excellent resources under the PlanFees umbrella. The Prism reporting tool allows one to compare their costs to thousands of plans of a similar size. Prism365 zeros in on advisor fees and services to help advisors figure out their relative price point based on service level and plan size. Recently released, RFP Express is a software that combines the ease of use of PlanFees software with the robust database of the provider analysis tool, giving you quotes from top providers within 24 hours.