Retirement Plan Services

HBK’s affiliated wealth management firm, HBKS Wealth Advisors, maintains a Retirement Plan Unit to work with employers to develop and maintain qualified retirement plans that accommodate today’s complex and challenging regulatory environment.

Some of the ways we help you:

Conflict-free, Open Architecture

Your retirement plan investment portfolio should be free of bias or incentive driven investments. HBKS Wealth Advisors offers most publicly traded mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (EFTs), and is not limited to company-sponsored or incentivized investment products.

• We use our conflict-free, open architecture platforms with access to more than 15,000 investment options, leaving us free to focus solely on best-in-class funds.
• The flexibility of an open architecture solution allows us to build an extraordinarily competitive investment lineup for retirement plan sponsors.
• We are not subject to the limitations and pressures of the typical marketplace based on the performance of limited investment alternatives.

Fiduciary Monitoring of Investment Options

As a retirement plan sponsor and fiduciary, you must select careful and supportable investment options to offer your plan participants. The HBKS Retirement Plan Unit works with clients through an Investment Policy Statement that details the roles and responsibilities of the various parties serving the retirement plan while defining the criteria for selection and replacement of investment options.

We monitor the plan’s investment options on a systematic and ongoing basis.

• We help with the documentation supporting the investment fiduciary’s decisions.
• On a regular basis, we review investment option benchmarks, including:
  • Performance relative to peer groups
  • Expense ratios
  • Measures of risk-adjusted return, such as the Sharpe ratio
  • Tenure of the money managers
  • Investment style consistency
• In the event that an investment option is to be replaced, the open architecture platform allows you to choose a competitive replacement fund.

Monitoring and Benchmarking Retirement Plan Fees and Expenses

Your retirement plan fiduciary responsibilities include keeping watch over plan fees and expenses. HBKS Wealth Advisors offers benchmarking reports that compare your plan’s investment manager and mutual fund expenses, recordkeeping and administrative expenses, and investment advice fees to hundreds of similarly sized plans.

Our services are characterized by thoroughness and in-depth knowledge:

• Plan sponsors can see how their plan compares to others: the most expensive, the least expensive, the median and the mean.
• Powerful information allows you as plan sponsor to document the process used to determine the reasonableness of your plan’s fees and can support you in renegotiating contracts or searching for new service providers.
• As a retirement plan sponsor working with HBKS Wealth Advisors, you can feel confident you are working with a skilled specialist guiding you on a systematic and ongoing basis through a sound plan management process.

Fee-based, Revenue-Neutral Pricing

Key to an investment portfolio that is designed in the best interests of your business and your retirement plan participants is unbiased investment advice, free from conflicts of interest and incentives to recommend any particular investment products or solutions.

HBKS Wealth Advisors:

• Is a fee-based advisory; we do not accept commissions on the investment products we use to build your retirement plan investment portfolio.
• Is a revenue-neutral service provider whose only incentive is to identify and recommend the best investment options for each retirement plan and its participants.
• Even when an investment option pays revenue sharing fees, we capture those revenue sharing dollars and use them to offset other fees in the plan.

Helping Plan Sponsors Manage Fiduciary Responsibility

As an employer and retirement plan sponsor, you are your retirement plan’s fiduciary and face personal responsibility and liability under ERISA. As such it is critical to select a retirement plan investment advisor that understands, develops strategies that comply with, and can even share that responsibility.

HBK’s affiliated wealth advisory firm, HBKS Wealth Advisors, can serve as either a co-fiduciary under ERISA Section 3(21) on matters related to investment advice, or a discretionary investment manager under ERISA Section 3(38).

HBK Wealth Advisors:

• Offers a specialized business unit to service our clients sponsoring qualified retirement plans such as 401(k)s, 403(b)s, defined benefit pension plans and others.
• Acknowledges and accepts responsibility to work exclusively in the best interests of the plan and its beneficiaries.

Participant Education and Counseling

As your retirement plan fiduciary, part of your responsibility is to educate participants on their plan. The HBKS Retirement Plan Unit delivers high-quality education to plan participants in a group setting or one-on-one. The training is designed to provide participants with the tools and knowledge to make thoughtful and educated decisions about their retirement plan contributions.

The HBKS program of participant education is thorough and flexible:

• Training can be delivered on-site, off-site or via webinar.
• Our professionals have extensive experience educating participants in a group setting through a variety of financial and retirement planning workshops.
• The one-on-one counseling option is available to participants with a financial advisor who works with families to plan long-term goals, including retirement.