Two recently announced partnerships are rolling out tools that they claim will help advisors build smarter 401(k) plans.
New York-based RiXtrema, a portfolio crash testing and risk management tool provider for financial advisors, announced in March a partnership to bring BrightScope’s retirement plan database to advisors’ fingertips.
Philadelphia-based BizEquity announced recently the addition of a similar data set, which it calls “Benefit Plan Data,” to the Big Data Prospector feature of its Advisor Office platform.
Both offerings involve the use of massive amounts of defined contribution plan information, mostly culled from Department of Labor Form 5500 filings, on financial advisors’ platforms.
"BizEquity will not stop adding data to our patented service until we provide the most powerful insight for every private company and for the advisors that serve them,” said Amir Tahvildaran, BizEquity’s vice president of data engineering, in a released statement.
Using BrightScope’s Plan Data Network platform, RiXtrema’s tools, like IRAFiduciaryOptimizer and 401(k)FiduciaryOptimizer, can help advisors make best interest determinations within retirement plans and rollovers by accessing one of the largest bodies of 401(k) information available.
BrightScope’s Plan Data Network works with eight of the top 10 U.S. asset managers by open-ended assets, and eight of the top 10 defined contribnution plan recordkeepers to create and maintain a databasewith information on more than 60,000 defined contribution plans.
“BrightScope comes in when we need information about the fees and investments within a retirement plan,” says Daniel Satchkov, president of RiXtrema. “It’s very difficult to find that information from public data. It is reported in a very ambiguous way.”
BizEquity has built a cloud-based big data service of its own for its 440 financial services clients that offers information on 33 million businesses, including plan data, to help clients determine business valuations and prospect for new retirement plan clients.
With the pending applicability of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, advisors will need to be able to prove that any recommendations to rollover a client’s retirement plan accounts into an IRA are being made in the client’s best interest.