Employers are beefing up retirement plans in order to increase participation and savings and meet the needs of the increasing number of employees who continue to work beyond retirement age, according to Fidelity.
And more are seeking the help of advisors to get them there, with 93% of plan sponsors working with an advisor, an all-time high, according to Fidelity’s 10th edition of its Plan Sponsor Attitudes Study.
The study said the top reasons plan sponsors hired advisors were to understand how well the plan is working for employees and how to improve it (27%), and to get help with the increasingly complicated process of managing a retirement plan (26%).
The study found that 62% of sponsors said their employees expect the plan to meet all of their funding needs in retirement, and 55% said they believe their plan participants are saving enough in the plan to retire.
Still, plan sponsors said they are actively seeking improvements to their plans. Three-fourths of sponsors indicated that they have made a change to their plan design or investment menu in the past two years. Twenty-six percent indicated that they have increased the match or added a match (24%). The top menu change, they said, was to increase the number of investment options, which is consistent with last year’s study.
Plan sponsors, the study showed, also are reviewing plan performance more often, with a shift away from annual reviews (14% in 2019 versus 27% in 2018) to quarterly reviews (45% in 2019 versus 38% in 2018).
“Plan sponsors recognize the increasingly important role they play in helping their employees reach retirement, and it is a win-win situation when they can help their employees reach their financial goals,” Jordan Burgess, head of specialist field sales overseeing defined contribution investment only (DCIO) sales at Fidelity Institutional Asset Management, said in a prepared statement.
“Plan sponsors are balancing both company and employee needs, and they’re looking to plan advisors to help them better understand the complexities of a retirement plan in order to meet those combined goals,” Burgess added.