Sign Iowa Banking RFP Fast

Industry sign banking iowa rfp fast

thanks Kelly and welcome everybody to our webinar today and what to expect when you're requesting and so as our nation's retirement plans have gained increasing attention from regulators I'm sure that a lot of you heard about the DOL ruling that was issued just last month about expanding the fiduciary standard we're getting a lot more attention from regulators for retirement plans and it's important for plan sponsors to document the due diligence they perform through their plans of course while this due diligence a lot of times takes the form of fee benchmarking various types of plan reporting an effective evaluation for those providing advisory services the retirement plans has really proved elusive during this webinar I'm going to walk through a simple questionnaire that you can use to document your evaluation of a current or prospective advisor for your plan the questions that are in this questionnaire will cover the broad range of topics that really provide that effective due diligence for investment advisors and will also help you provide the due diligence that's required under the new fiduciary ruling issued by the Department of Labor I'm going to cover the answer is that you should really be looking for and the logic behind the direction of the questions included as a part of that tool we'll have some links that we'll get out to everybody after the webinar is over where you can go to download the questionnaire it is not branded or anything with SWV C it's really meant to be an easy effective tool for you to use in your practice and to really walk away from this webinar with actionable solutions that you can implement quickly before we get started we're actually going to put a poll out for everybody to take a look in and provide us with a little bit of feedback about why you're attending today's webinar basically there's four answers either you're completing an investment advisor RFP within the next six months within the next six to 12 months at some point beyond the next 12 months or really if you're just looking to gather general due diligence as a result of the DOL ruling we found that a lot of folks really are very interested in the new DOL ruling and understanding how do they provide you diligence and again the questionnaire in the RFP document that we're gonna send you links for to be able to download will really help you understand how to do that due diligence how to get information it doesn't go through all the specific regulations or anything of the new DLL ruling but the results of those those questionnaires that you would get back from advisors will help you in terms of being able to see just what you're looking for are they fiduciary and all the things that we're going to cover as we go through today's webinar as we look through the results here that are up on everybody's screen it looks like it's about a 50/50 split about half of you are here I'm looking to potentially do an RFP over the next 12 months or a little bit beyond 12 months for some of you and then about half of you are here just to get some general due diligence I'm really bone up on how to go out and see you know exactly what are your investment advisers doing so with that we'll take the poll off the screen there and we'll go ahead and move right into the rest of our presentation today so a lot of times there's very predictable questions whenever you're out doing an evaluation of an investment advisor things that are very easy to ask would be things like obviously what is your fee how do you get paid which is a very different question from what is your fee are you a fiduciary to our plan what funds do you use and then how often are we going to see you those are all very predictable questions and a lot of the questions that you'll see in the questionnaire will send everybody is there very predictable questions they'll have these kind of questions out there but what we're going to go through today is that sometimes the answers that you get from those questions tell you a little bit more than you would think so questions like do you have ERISA insurance well that's a very easy question to say do you have insurance but the reason that we ask that question and the answers that we're looking for from the advisors when we ask those questions that sometimes goes in a different direction than what you would expect so thoroughly understanding the role of your investment advisor is an essential component of the risk management strategy for your plan I think that kind of goes about saying but as I said during the description of the webinar most plan sponsors view risk management through the lens of benchmarking their RAC keeper or TPA the investment advisor is usually seen as that kind of go-between or that advocate for your plan and so when we ask our plan sponsors what you consider to be a successful investment advisor the overwhelming majority answer with some version of the idea of good investment performance for retirement plans this is someone providing a report on the investment performance and maybe doing a fun change once in a while and now performance is of course very important everybody wants to get good investment report performance nobody wants to have a menu of investments for their retirement plan that's consistently underperforming but as a plan sponsor this is not the entirety of the benefits a retirement plan advisor should be providing the main reason that you want to hire a retirement plan investment advisor is ultimately risk management you're hiring a prudent expert to perform a service that is not a core competency of your organization's retirement plan committee when it comes to risk management the DOL doesn't care about performance all of these new regulations that have come out recently none of it has to do specifically with investment performance they care about the process the process the process the process how did you get to where you are today and why if you have a good process in place the performance will certainly follow but they want to see the steps that were taken exactly how did you get to where you are today so how do you evaluate that process in risk management there are a lot of underlying points that can help strengthen your documentation an understanding of the services an advisor can provide your plan as part of being your proven expert so beginning at the end the points these points up here are the conclusion that I hope to bring everyone to as we progress through this presentation it's very important to ask your advisor to provide due diligence information to your retirement plan committee annually the DOL has started requesting these types of information during the initial stages of an audit the purpose of which is to confirm plan sponsors are conducting that ongoing due diligence of their vendors and to ensure the appropriateness and suitability of those relationships the new regulations that have come out only strength in that position this has been something that's been coming along for a long time now but getting that due diligence requesting that information if you're being audited if there's ever litigation that's coming your way having that due diligence already in place is going to be critical for you to be able to show yes we are in fact doing the right thing making sure our adviser is doing the right thing for us that information should document all aspects of the relationship and provide you with critical documents that you can keep in your compliance files internally much like we as investment advisors have rules that dictate the retention of our records communications marketing all the aspects of our practices it's important that you establish internally a procedure for documenting the relationship with your adviser for your own internal compliance files the recent deal while ruling on expanding the fiduciary standard again it only underscores the need to ensure that you're performing that required due diligence so again the issues that I'm going to be discussing today it follows the course of that questionnaire that will send everyone a link to be able to go in and easily download electronically and the questionnaire and it's not branded with our name it's intended to provide you with an immediate simple efficient way to perform due diligence nearly all of the questions that you'll see on that questionnaire are presented in a yes or no format there's radio buttons for the adviser to be able to provide their response with an easy click there are a couple of questions where there is more than a yes or no response required such as what the advisors fee structure and where those spaces are provided there's a very limited amount of space to provide the requested answer did you ask very open-ended questions of advisors or really anyone in the advisor or retirement plan industry they can provide you with a long you know kind of rambling answer and the point of these questionnaires is just get to the point tell us what in fact you make how do you get paid those kind of types of things again the goal is to make the process as easy as possible to determine the services you're receiving and evaluate if you in fact do need to take action so the first step in performing due diligence is to ensure that you fully understand the scope of services that you're getting now from your advisor if you have a current advisor for your plan it's important to say just just what is this person in fact to do for us the primary objective should be to determine if they're performing duties that would deem them to be a fiduciary as defined by ERISA this includes confirmation that basic rules are in place for selecting monitoring replacing investment options as needed and those are of course put forth in your plans investment policy statement or most commonly referred to as an IPS despite all of the regulations that we have in the retirement industry the investment policy statement is still not a legally required document kind of staggering back to me that we haven't gotten to the point where it is in fact legally required but if you are ever in a situation where you're audited or if you're in a situation where you're being challenged in terms of litigation or something like that from a participant the investment policy statement is one of the very first things that they're going to ask you for it again have all those pieces to stay how do you select monitor and replace investment options so ensuring that you not only have an investment policy in place but that your advisor is reviewing that document and updating it on an ongoing basis is a critical fact in conjunction with the IPS evaluate if your advisor is providing you specific investment recommendations in writing getting them in writing is very very important so that you can reference the subjective opinion in your committee mate minutes never reword what your advisor is saying or try to interpret written opinions from your advisor because when you do that it can really shift that responsibility back onto you as a plan sponsor and I'll stay here to getting the specific recommendation in writing is critical because a lot of times you're going to get a lot of information from your providers that really is just investment reporting investment reporting is not advice if they send you a list saying here's the performance and the rankings of all of your investment options well clearly you can see that fund a is not doing well because it's in the 80th percentile over the last three and five years well that's still not advice it's don't specifically tell you Monday needs to be removed we're recommending that you remove it and replace it with fun to be that is a fiduciary act simply providing you with reporting and saying fun day obviously doesn't look very good you can sort of see that in the report here's a bunch of options that we have in that same category you know it's up to you now off you go so again that is not in fact advice that's not tripping that wire and being a fiduciary that's simply reporting to you and getting caught up in that line between the two can sometimes be again very confusing for plan sponsors finally look and see if your advisor is providing any type of participant education if they're providing model portfolios all of these types of things that I'm talking about specific advice and going through and getting you recommendations in writing all of these items are going to deem your advisor to be a fiduciary because after all if your advisor doesn't provide services that would deem them to be a fiduciary why would you pay them to be your investment advisor and again the days where fiduciary status is determined solely by the advisors willingness to accept the title of a fiduciary are gone the douchery status is now determined by those services we just covered whereby an advisor will be deemed a fiduciary simply by providing the services a plan sponsor should expect from their retirement plan advisor simply being a fiduciary is no longer the differentiating factor but it's important that you have an understood documented relationship with your advisor the new regulations that have come out there's a lot of ways that you can in certain situations try to get around you can get through these contract exemptions and things like that that can avoid putting someone in a fiduciary life but you just have to kind of ask yourself you know why would we do that if someone is trying to get around a rule that is really created to be in our best interest and to protect retirement plan sponsors and retirement plan participants why would we want to take advantage of that there are a lot of our ia about their registered investment advisors and retirement plan advisors in general that are very willing to take on that fiduciary role to give you specific recommendations and it takes on the bat fiduciary load off your shoulders you can eliminate your fiduciary responsibilities again you can certainly fulfill it by inviting other people into the boat with you so what's the possible resolution if you find that you don't have someone that's in a fiduciary capacity or if you find that maybe it's a little bit unclear documenting that your advisor acknowledges our fiduciary role it really that's what it comes down to you want it in writing document it for me again this is one of the questions and that questionnaire we're going to give you it just tell us yes we are in fact a fiduciary to your plan ask them to provide you with that information and with written recommendations on an ongoing basis now before I get into more specifics of all the different documentation and some of the things that you want to ask for for due diligence let me provide a bit of an example so everybody can see this very beautiful bridge it has a very high bridge across the coastal view this is actually in Big Sur in just near San Francisco California I actually personally had the opportunity to drive across this bridge at one point and I think most people looking at this bridge even though it's very high you might be scared of heights regardless of the situation wouldn't even think twice about driving across that bridge no one listening to this would even think twice about it probably going even let's say 35 miles an hour going across maybe even sneak a peek at the view instead of the road ahead now with that in mind I don't think anyone has a problem driving across that bridge let me change the picture in just one way so looking at this bridge now with no guardrails how does everyone feel about driving across the bridge and when we do this presentation live and we talk to plan sponsors they usually get to good laugh because forget about 35 miles per hour most people wouldn't want to drive across it at all with that in mind we asked people how many times have you actually hit the guardrails from going across the bridge the vast majority of those people listening would say never so then why does it matter if the guardrails are there or not because it gives you a level of comfort to know that in the event something wrong whether it's a blown tire a strong wind or in the case of your retirement plan a deal a lot or litigation those guardrails are there to prevent things from going very badly and that same kind of logic can be applied to it prophetic professional responsibilities for a retirement plan you have those guardrails in place fiduciary responsibilities in place to make sure that if something goes wrong or if you have something come up those guardrails are there to help protect you and help guide you in the right direction so I talked briefly before about your advisor accepting their role as a fiduciary but it really goes further than that and we're talking about professional responsibilities simply because your advisor commits to their role as a fiduciary does not necessarily mean that they will take professional responsibility for their actions we encourage plan sponsors to take a closer look at their advisory agreements to determine if your advisor accepts the liability associated with their duties if they protect you and or if they limit your rights under ERISA you want to ask your advisor if they take responsibility for their actions and to what degree terms like gross negligence are meant to protect the advisor not the plan sponsor and you really need to try and avoid those if you can the reason being gross negligence is pretty hard to prove first of all and it's very hard to prove as well without putting yourself also in in hot water because if they were grossly negligent and just you know really intended to harm you well you should have known that that was happening because it's your job to provide due diligence and to ensure that they're doing something that's prudent for you and your retirement plan participants so having terms like that gross negligence and there's a handful of others are the types of things that are really meant to protect just the advisor not meant to help you or protect you in any way you also want to look and find out if there are third-party advisory solutions offered through your advisor or even just your record-keeping platform these requires direct due diligence just like what we're covering here for your retirement plan Advisors and this can go through any the variety of different things like financial engines and Morningstar and a lot of the different programs that kind of snap on with your record-keeping system or or even a proprietary system with your advisor you just want to make sure that if you have those kinds of third-party solutions that they are in fact getting the same due diligence that you're providing for your advisor as a whole so on the last slide I talked about professional responsibilities and what that should really look like and the things that you want to see in your agreements are a hold harmless for your retirement plan committee the company and its officers this means that your advisor is willing to take responsibility for the services they're providing and we'll take first chair in defending the company if you're ever challenged you want someone that's going to come out step in front of you and say this is our responsibility we're here to protect our plan sponsor it also ensures that their attention and cooperation from the moment you voice your concern and hopefully prevents the development of an adversarial relationship it's saying we're on the same side we're both trying to push for the same direction and we're here to protect our plan participant and to protect the company in the event that a participant wants to say we haven't done something that's in their best interests so something else to avoid just like we want to avoid things like gross negligence you want to look through your agreement and make sure that they're not limiting you to arbitration we found that many agreements have a provision that will limit dispute resolution to arbitration but by limiting your recourse to arbitration you're going to be seeking remedy from the adviser after the fact in the event that action comes from a current or former employee they are not going to be limited to arbitration they can come after you with really everything that they've got but if you're you know into a situation with your adviser arbitration very well might be the right course of action to resolve things but you don't want to be limited only to arbitration in the event that you need to to go that direction so this next section of the presentation deals with your advisors risk management protocol and it'll call out and detail if they maintain professional liability insurance specifically for ERISA if they do have those conflicts of interest their policy on solicitation and what managed account solutions they may providing so that looks look into each one of these in a little bit more detail so professional liability insurance and is specific to ERISA and it's an important part of a retirement plan investment advisors practice for a variety of reasons even separate from those that most consider to be pretty obvious having insurance obviously it helps to bear a portion of the cost in the event of a dispute just like if you're going across the bridge with guardrails and you crash your car under the guardrails you have insurance in order to cover a portion of that liability this insurance is very much that same kind of thing however professional liability insurance is different than the typical you know insurance or errors and omissions insurance that many are familiar with in our investment industry you know insurance covers obvious errors and omissions things like you are moving from one fund to another and the money moves to the wrong investment option because of a clerical error or you omit to make a change whenever you intended to make that change that's that's an error that's an omission it's things that happen by accident or in the course of business but it doesn't cover professional contact conduct or judgment and that's what this is for the most important aspect of professional liability insurance is that it will illustrate if your advisor has regularly had their practice and procedures scrutinized by a professional risk on a writer who focuses exclusively on matters involving arista so they're looking into all the different pieces of this investment advisors practice and making sure that all the pieces work together and it's going to cover that professional conduct and judgment because if you say or your advisor comes to you and says you should remove Funday and insert fund B there's no right or wrong answer they're removing fund a is not necessarily the right or wrong answer it is a judgment call it could six months later be the best investment that has ever lived over that next six months so there's always a certain judgment aspect to going in and just acting what you feel at that time with the information you have is the best interest of your plan and its participants but so when they look at all these different pieces and they really underwrite and look at the entire investment advisors practice the underwriter reviews the integration of that investment policy statement documenting the steps involved in making recommendations and continuity of the firm's fiduciary discipline they also assess the risks involved in the nature of the firm's clients do they have clients that are kind of all over the map do they have a lot of different types of retirement plans at all 401 k's or is it defined benefits and top half plans and a lot of the different things that are offered out there in the marketplace so they assess the risks involved in the nature of the firm's clients and and how they all play together and how the firm itself is looking at those clients differently the existence of professional liability coverage for investment advisory services provides evidence that risk underwriters who know what to look for have reviewed your advisor so again this is one of those questions where the reason that we ask that of an investment advisor is not just to make sure that they have insurance if things go wrong but it's also to understand and make sure that someone who knows what to look for has gone through that practice and call it out anything that may be of concern for you as a plan sponsor conflicts interests are something that has become increasingly important I think to plan sponsors and with the new Department of Labor ruling that expands the fiduciary standard conflicts of interest are becoming even more important for plan sponsors to avoid these include anything that could be perceived to influence the judgment of your advisor while the FEC provides regulatory relief for advisors that disclose their conflicts of interest in writing that's not the same thing on the arrest aside the fiduciary standards for this practice on ERISA are very much different and the interpretation by the employee benefits Security Administration or the EBS a which is the enforcement arm under the Department of Labor is that disclosure is not a remedy for a conflict of interest when it comes to ERISA they require that any potential conflict of interest be completely eliminated and documenting potential conflicts such as receiving a bonus for retaining business with a vendor or accepting reimburse reimbursement for things like due diligence travel those can have unintended consequences basically it can serve as evidence for the Department of Labor labor against you the plan sponsor for saying yeah we knew that we had a conflict of interest and we didn't take any action so it's very important and it's part of again this questionnaire that everybody's going to get to say tell us do you have any conflicts of interest yes or no if you have a conflict we need to know exactly what that is because we need to make sure that we eliminate it the worst thing that you can do is to document we know they have a conflict of interest and then take no action because someone can come back to you and say clearly here it is in writing you knew they had a conflict and yet you continue to operate under under that conflict of interest the next part is somewhat tied to conflicts of interest but it goes to solicitation and it pertains to advisers using the relationship with the plan to solicit plan participants for other financial services this is a big part of that new DOL ruling to say solicitation of your employees for let's say things like a roll over to an IRA is going to be very strictly scrutinized and very really almost prohibited and there can be prohibited transactions there the reason being that let's say that you have a 50 million dollar retirement plan and that participant is in your plan and they're getting the benefit of that pricing for having a nice sized retirement plan and yeah not paying maybe what you would consider to be a retail fee and then the advisor comes in and says well you should roll your money over here into this IRA the participant does that and when then they bind that well my hundred thousand dollar balance that I rolled over into the IRA is not able to get that same fee structure as the plan and that's a lot of what the rollovers and the conflicts of interest and solicitation piece of the new DOL ruling is trying to address they want to make sure that if someone is out there and they're recommending something to a participant that it is really in the best interest of that participant so we really we really feel and have fouls we've done this presentation before in the past even before the ruling that this really should be viewed as a questionable practice if they're going to be soliciting other services from your employees given the possibility that an employee can interpret that solicitation by the advisor as an endorsement of the advisor by you as a plan sponsor even if the services seem to be reasonable or beneficial something could go wrong at any point the participant can challenge the plan sponsor for what they perceived as an endorsement by you as a plan sponsor so again this has become increasingly important with the new definition of a fiduciary and an explain it expands the new rule who is in fact a fiduciary for your for your plan so again if you do have an advisor that is soliciting your employees for any other service make sure that you understand what's going on what those services are and it may in fact expand your due diligence because if they are offering other services you're gonna need to do due diligence on those other services as well in the event that a participant wants to challenge you saying that we pop at you we're endorsing this other service so managed to count solutions we talked a little bit about this earlier but while these solutions may be worthwhile the implications with respect to specialize reporting and fiduciary liability really do need to be understood by you as a plan sponsor it's important to establish that your advisor understands their responsibilities in documenting that a prudent fiduciary process has been followed for all investment decisions whether it's directly from their firm or through a third party solution they've recommended so in other words if your advisor has recommended that you use financial engines or Morningstar or any of these other types of managed solutions that are available through your record-keeping platform you want to make sure did you do the due diligence on it do you know what this third-party solution actually is what it does how it affects our employees we had a senior-level c-suite executive at one of our clients that just by chance got two statements on the same day they got one from their record keeper and they got one from the managed account provider this executive was not in fact in the managed account service but it was they were soliciting to say you know we'd like to have you in a managed account service we think we can help you and there's been an increasing focus on that that outcome right participant outcomes and participant success it's got a lot of different terms but basically understanding how are you going to get to retirement are you gonna have enough money once you got there but what this executive was was disturbed by was that using the same information and date of birth account balance salary although the readily available information they came up with two very different predictions the one from the record keeper said you're way behind you may not have enough you need to save more and the one from the provider the managed account provider said in fact you can cut back your savings rate change your investments this way and you'll have more than enough lunch in your retirement and again it's all based on what are the assumptions what age are you going to retire how long are you going to live what's your savings rate how do you expect your investments to grow all those assumptions will have very different impacts on the outcome and that message again even for an executive for this firm caught that and was able to say this just really doesn't drive this really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me of why I'd be getting different projections from what is essentially my one 401k account provider so understanding those managed account solutions really being able to dig into them and understand what are they doing for our employees what are the fees and is it providing in fact a good benefit for our employees in the long run so fees these should be an easy question to answer but often the response can be a bit unclear what are you paying what are they making do they receive revenue from any outside sources in connection with your plan is everything disclosed on their 482 notice or are there items that are not required to be disclosed again these are all questions that you want to ask your advisers there are questions that frankly you want to ask everybody that's involved with your plant record keepers advisors TPAs anyone else involved with your plan you want to ask your advisor to provide a well-defined easy-to-understand and most importantly transparent pricing schedule whenever possible try to modify pricing schedules to eliminate variable compensation based on the investment options offered and that point right there is something that is now going to be required under the new Department of Labor ruling it's gonna say you cannot get variable compensation depending on the investments that you use in other words if fund a pays you 10 basis points and fund B pays you 20 basis points you can't have that decision you can't go with fun B because the page of 20 basis point you need to go and the industry as a whole is moving towards explicit these schedules again the three points on the slide here well-defined easy to understand transparent this practice is referred to as the neutrality it removes any conflict of interest when the advisor is making investment recommendations again you don't want to have someone that is getting variable compensation or who potentially is going to get one investment share class over another just because it'll change the way that they're paid those rules do not go into effect until next year where the advisors that do receive variable comp are forced to comply with it there are ways that you can get grandfathered or that you can kind of get exemptions but again asking explicit questions of your advisor and understanding how they get paid what they get paid why they get paid what they do is really going to go a long way to understand do we need to take action now to make sure that we have someone who is acting in our best interest has an explicit fee and again hit these three bullet points that are up on the screen as it applies to fees so the final section of due diligence refers to the documentation that your advisor should get for you on an annual basis for your internal due diligence files and so this is a couple of different things we've talked about some of it already but the audited financials for your advisors firm this gives you insight to a couple of different things are they going to be able to meet their obligations if you are using an advisor that is kind of that one-person shop and they're promising you that we are in fact a fiduciary we agree to hold you harmless depending on the size of your plan and the amount of revenue and how much risk they retain from that professional liability insurance again it gives you just a little bit of insight are they going to be able to meet the obligations in fact that they've put out there for you as your fiduciary as your outside professional it also gives you insight into various sources of income is this firm really in the retirement plan business we have found a lot of investment advisors that they really are only in the retirement plan business so that they can get access to the Private Wealth side the fees that you can charge on Private Wealth Management I'll tell you frankly are much higher than what you can receive as an advisor for a retirement plan and so a lot of those will just do the retirement plan so they can get access to those d suite folks or those high balance or higher earners where they can then hopefully get business on the other side of the fence again the new ruling from the DOL is trying to sort some of that out to make sure that we're not having those we have people that really are committed I think what we're gonna find over the next 12 months as these new rules come into effect next year it's going to be more consolidation you're gonna find a lot more folks that are specialists in the retirement plan market and not just the dabblers and the folks that have just maybe one or two plans but really the the firm's that focus on really just solely the retirement plan market proof of professional liability insurance we talked about that you know what is it why is it important for you as a plan sponsor but getting that that proof of insurance making sure that your plan name is on that due diligence I'm sorry professional liability insurance certificate it'll give you a lot of information about coverage deductibles provisions just all the different pieces of the insurance just like you would have for again your auto insurance for what's your deductible how much risk do you retain and again that'll go hand in hand with the audited financials and then the last piece is something that every registered investment advisory firm is required to have the FTC Form ADV part 2 a much more commonly referred to now as the firm brochure so what that does is it goes through and it really dissect their entire practice what type of plans do they have how do they charge their fees how important is the ERISA business really to them do they have any regulatory concerns have they ever been sued have they ever been censured for any reason do they have any conflicts of interest they all have to be explicitly stated in this document so this is a good one-stop place to really review understand your advisors practice some of them are very long and can be a little bit difficult to read but the good news about the firm brochure is that it is presented in a question-and-answer format so it makes it a little bit easier to get through and also if you read it just one time the way that they've structured these is you have to get a new one every single year but if anything changes from one year to the next so you have your 2015 firm brochure and then you issue your 2016 brochure if there's anything different in your new one you have to put it right up front and so it's actually I think even in front of the table of contents so when you go and you get this from year to year you don't have to read the whole thing you can just go to the front look at the beginning and say has anything changed for our advisor since the last time we looked at this and again real quick evaluation understand is anything different we also provide the the questionnaire that again I keep referencing that we're going to send out a link to everybody for we asked everyone to fill this out every year you know get your advisor to fill it out every year so you can confirm all these different questions we've talked about if anything has changed in a part of our practice at SMU BCC is again we proactively give this out to our clients every year just to make sure here you have the due diligence then the file something needs you to do and then you can just kind of file it away and move on so the next part is really talking about the full RFP documentation so there are the due diligence that I've been talking about going through you can apply that to your existing advisor or even a prospective advisor but if you want to go in a little bit more detail really go into the full RFP I'm sure everybody has done an RFP at some point or another whether it's for record-keeping or or what have you this lasts a lot more detailed questions about just how do they run their practice how do they do the things they do there's a handful of really high-level points that that go into the different sections so things like about your firm team who's the service team that's going to deal with us you know how do you do your investment in participant services how do you handle working with all the different providers that are out there so the record-keeping provider that you might have for your plan and then things like fiduciary status fees technology and any security or business continuity these usually run by the time you know we complete them for folks that send us a full RFP and we'll be about 25 to 30 pages maybe with answers and so forth so they can get to be a little bit longer but it does get into a lot more of the nitty-gritty specifics about how do you do what you do for your clients and how would you do it for us as a plan sponsor this next page is again winding things up this is the the slide that I started with by saying asking your advisor to provide due diligence information annually documenting all aspects with really getting those critical documents for your compliance files those two links that you see down on the bottom of this slide here are the links that I will send out to everybody that's on the call today along with a copy of this presentation in a PDF so that you can go through and see all the different pieces but those two links will take you directly to either the RFI questionnaire that I referenced frequently throughout the webinar very easy to download it as a PDF again it's free it doesn't have our branding or anything anywhere on it and then there's the full RFP which is actually a Word document and that's so that you can edit it delete questions add questions and you can send it out to prospective advisors where they can then just kind of fill in as they go in and provide full RFP documentation for you so with that if there are any questions we still have a little bit of time left here at the end if there any questions please feel free to submit them at the bottom of your screen and Kelly will kind of weed through them and let me know if there's any that we want to answer here live on the call we have gotten a couple in Brad first one is if we had to ask our advisor one question about the recent DOL ruling what should that be well it's funny we we actually had that question as one of the recent conferences and we did do with you guys down in Orlando and what we tell you is go to your advisor and say how you feel about the recent DLL ruling it's a very simple question just to say how do you feel about it because their answer will be very telling if they are not in favor of the ruling then you might want to ask them why because this rule really was created to protect retirement plan sponsors to protect retirement plan investors and participants by making sure that that advisors really acting in your best interest and your participants best interest so I'm asking how they feel about it if they're in favor of it if they fully support it then very likely they're gonna be in a practice of being a fiduciary for you and having a an explicit level fee structure but I'm just asking that one question is just how do you feel about it and I think their answer will tell you a lot okay thank you second question that we got in how often should we perform due diligence or a full RFP so the due diligence definitely is something you want to get annually things can change pretty quickly in the marketplace and for your plan advisor and for even for your individual plan so getting that due diligence shouldn't shouldn't be very hard it shouldn't take you a lot of time some advisors like I said we send it out proactively to our clients every year so getting it once a year just the due diligence stuff it is very easy and quick to do as far as doing a full RFP one or two answers you could say oh we'll do a full RFP maybe once every five years or more often if something changes or certainly if you have any concerns whatsoever with your current advisor whether they're not providing the depth of services you need or they're not providing fiduciary protection that you need then certainly step it up do the do the full RFP most plan sponsors are aware some or not that you know switching advisors is not like going through a conversion you know there's no big conversion from one provider to the next you know most plan participants don't even know frankly that the advisor exists unless they're out there doing employee education meetings so yes there's a service concern or or anything around that concerning your advisor then certainly you'd want to do an RFP done another question that just came in does this applied to 321 or only 338 advisors and so that's actually a good question and for everybody on the calls benefit the difference between a 321 and a 338 investment advisor is a 321 investment advisor does not have discretion over the accounts that are considered non-discretionary it basically means they come to you and say our advice to you is that you should remove fund a and replace it with fun to be and it's up to you as a plan sponsor to say yes we want that to happen or no we don't want that to happen so it's a non discretion for 321 if you have a 338 investment advisor that's you as a plan sponsor saying we're giving the power to this advise to make changes without consulting with us first so hopefully that advisor will still communicate with you there's still a requirement to communicate with your participants but it would be more they come to you and say Monday is going to be replaced with fun B and as far as due diligence and it's very much for both we have had a lot of plan sponsors ask us well which is better the having a 321 advisor or having a 338 investment advisor and frankly there's there's not any difference in terms of the type of protection that it provides you 338 is not a premium service in terms of providing you additional fiduciary coverage anyone who tells you is a premium service and it's going to provide you a greater degree of fiduciary coverage in our opinion it's probably just trying to charge a higher fee for it in our practice we don't charge anything different between 321 or 338 it's just a different kind of due diligence between the two with 3:38 yes you don't have to make the decision but you still have to show that you've done due diligence on that advisor that you're watching them making sure that they are in fact taking care of the plans investments and making changes as appropriate and following the process that they sold to you versus 321 it's kind of built in that if you have investment meetings and they're making recommendations and you're accepting those recommendations that all kind of provides you another level of documentation ongoing so it's very much required for both types of investment advisors thank you one other question came in what are the red flags that we should avoid at this point so and I touched on it a little bit as we went through I think that a red flag for me would be an advisor who is going to try and take advantage of the contract exemption so if someone comes to you and says well based on your deal while rolling we're going to take advantage of the best interest contract exemption and that means this and that because again basically would that come down to is that that's a way to circumvent a that was designed to really protect you as a plan sponsor and your participants I'm not saying that it's inherently evil and that people that do it are intentionally trying to harm you but in our opinion there are so many out there that are willing to be an RI a to you a registered investment advisor willing to be a fiduciary willing to without limit act in your best interest that a red flag for me would be someone that says they're going to try and take advantage of contract exemptions so and again there's a lot of different types of products out there but strictly as an advisor to retirement plan I'm using the exemption would be at a bit of a red flag okay well if there are any other questions certainly feel free to contact Brad after the webinar or communicate with him again Brad will be sending out the links to the two documents that he's been referencing the whole webinar and also his slides and we will be posting a recording of this webinar on our website as well as sending you out a link to that and the continuing education information after the webinar probably on tomorrow if everyone wouldn't mind taking just a quick moment when we closed the webinar a quick five question survey will pop up on your screen if you don't mind just letting us know we love evaluations so Brad thank you so much I don't see any other questions that have come in at this time so we certainly appreciate all of your information and insight and thanks for a great webinar thank you alright everyone have a great afternoon thank you