Strategies for retirement plan sponsors
Empower your retirement plan offering with skilled investment, fiduciary, and administration services from Wilmington Trust.
Comprehensive solutions designed to help make your employer-sponsored retirement plan a success
With guidance from a dedicated retirement plan advisor, you can confidently navigate Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) regulations and benefit from a plan designed to enhance the experience of your participants.
At Wilmington Trust, our Retirement Advisory Services team is committed to providing you with the industry experience, regulatory guidance, and investment strategies you need to make the most of your retirement plan—creating a meaningful, participant-centered benefit for your company.
Delivering a robust plan experience
Wilmington Trust can help you navigate ERISA regulatory requirements and enhance participant experience through a comprehensive, well-designed plan.
Solutions for retirement plan sponsors
With the many complexities and risks associated with administering a retirement plan, plan sponsors should consider the benefits of hiring an advisor to help fulfill the mandatory and often time-consuming duties.
Our Retirement Advisory Services team has the experience and skill to help you meet your fiduciary responsibilities, ease your administrative burden, and serve as a prudent steward of your participants’ retirement assets.
Is your plan effective and on track to achieve its stated goals? We’ll start the review process by analyzing your current objectives-based plan design, based on our deep discovery process and the latest industry trends. In customizing our recommendations to your needs, we scrutinize the suitability and effectiveness of myriad plan facets and provisions, including:
- Administrator and recordkeeper
- Safe harbor
- Employer match/profit-sharing
- Auto-enroll/auto-increase
- Pre-tax/Roth/After-tax
- ERISA bond
- Eligibility
- Loans
- Qualified default investment alternative (QDIA)
- Vesting schedule
- Hardship and in-service distributions
- Forced rollouts
Our consultative role is ongoing and includes proactive, continuing guidance, recordkeeping benchmarking, governance education, and fiduciary training, as well as quarterly communications and biannual webinars tailored to your plan’s committee.
A plan is only as successful as its level of participation. We are strong advocates for employee financial success and can help enhance understanding—which is inextricably tied to boosting engagement. First, we evaluate behavior patterns and tailor means of information based on how participants respond—depending on whether they are more reliant (do-it-for-me), need assistance (help-me), or self-directed (do-it-myself) learners.
Guidance is also geared toward various investor profiles and life stages, utilizing retirement readiness analysis metrics and other guidance tools to build profiles, launch strategies, develop relevant thought leadership, and maintain flexibility to accommodate remote or multi-location workforces.
Selecting your degree of investment management
Whether serving as your plan’s investment manager or co-fiduciary, stringent controls geared toward addressing fiduciary obligations are the linchpin of our entire approach.
Two levels of fiduciary coverage
Delegating investment oversight can help you to fulfill your fiduciary responsibilities, enabling you to focus more time on running your core business. While ERISA still requires you to monitor all plan activities, Wilmington Trust offers investment advisory support based on the needs of your plan.
With deep-rooted fiduciary experience at the core of what we do, we can serve as either an ERISA 3(38) investment manager or an ERISA 3(21) co-fiduciary advisor.
Wilmington Trust Retirement Advisory Services professionals do not provide legal or tax advice. Plan sponsors and recordkeepers should coordinate with legal and tax counsel on compliance questions.
When serving as a 3(38) investment manager, we have been specifically appointed by the organization to have full discretionary authority and control to make the actual investment decisions. In this capacity, we may select, monitor, remove, and replace the investment options offered under the plan, and must acknowledge our fiduciary status in writing.
In this role, we can serve as a paid service provider that provides investment recommendations but does not have discretionary authority to make the actual investment decisions. Instead, as co-fiduciary advisor we typically provide suggestions to the plan sponsor, who is free to accept or reject those recommendations and who must then execute the investment decisions for the plan. The plan sponsor and the 3(21) co-fiduciary advisor share fiduciary responsibility.
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