Supporting you in meeting your fiduciary responsibility.
Serving as the fiduciary expert from advising plan fiduciaries to making investment selections and managing investment portfolios.
Learn more about how we take on fiduciary responsibilities in meeting the required duties of loyalty and due care in developing a prudent process to managing your retirement plans.
Our Essence of Being…
ERISA Investment Fiduciary Expert
We act either as a fiduciary consultant advisor serving as a co-fiduciary, or as a discretionary fiduciary manager taking on full responsibilities.
ERISA 3(21) Investment Advisor
We act as the investment consultant to the plan sponsor or plan administrator. We provide ongoing fiduciary investment advice and to assist the plan sponsor in meeting its fiduciary responsibility under ERISA. We also assist in developing a prudent process to managing plan assets to include the developing and maintenance of an Investment Policy Statement (IPS). An important responsibility of a plan sponsor is to meet its duty to monitor. In addition to investment monitoring, we assist in monitoring the services and the costs of service providers as well as consulting on plan design best practices based on the objectives of the plan sponsor.
ERISA 3(38) Discretionary Investment Manager
When we are appointed in this role, we take on the full fiduciary responsibility to design and maintain an Investment Policy and to elect and monitor all plan investment options. Although the plan sponsor remains responsible to monitor our services, we are liable for our investment decisions.
Separately, we can serve as the plan consultant to assist in monitoring the services and the costs of service providers as well as consulting on plan design best practices based on the objectives of the plan sponsor.
Fiduciary investing, under defined contribution plan context, is not about identifying the lowest cost investments nor identifying yesterday’s winners. The overriding objective is to serve solely in the interest of the participants. This means identifying a group of prudent investment options that offer each participant the access to construct a personalized, risk appropriate and diversified long-term portfolio.
News & Commentaries
Explore the EW Newsfeed
Quarterly Market Commentary – 2024 Q4
A Kaleidoscope of Possibilities What we have learned from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID pandemic is that, every so many years, endogenous or exogenous events shock our economy and our highly integrated and complex global system. Transmission...
Quarterly Market Commentary – 2024 Q3
Coming Down the Mountain...Don't Look Down! It is the general consensus among mountain climbers and hikers that going up is relatively safer or easier than coming down. When descending, it is hard to be sure footed when distracted by the height and the fear of...
Quarterly Market Commentary – 2024 Q2
Summary The financial, emotional, geopolitical, demographics, financial and economic impact and effects (especially exposing the system vulnerability and behavioral finance) from the Pandemic have a very long tail. Changes in some areas are more structural and...