Corporate Retirement Plans

3(21) versus 3(38), in plain terms

As a 3(21) investment fiduciary, we advise — recommending the lineup, monitoring it, and documenting everything — while your committee keeps final authority. As a 3(38) investment manager, we take discretion: we select and replace investments ourselves, and with it, we take on that slice of fiduciary liability.

Which is right depends on how much control your committee wants to retain versus delegate. We help you choose deliberately instead of discovering the difference during an audit.

Process you can hand to an auditor

Fiduciary protection comes from documented process: an investment policy statement, quarterly monitoring against it, fee benchmarking against peer plans, and minutes that show the work was done. We build and maintain that paper trail so a Department of Labor inquiry is an inconvenience, not a crisis.

What your plan is really costing

Retirement-plan fees hide in plain sight — bundled into fund expense ratios, recordkeeping charges, and revenue-sharing arrangements few sponsors ever untangle. You can’t prove fees are reasonable if you’ve never benchmarked them, and “reasonable” is exactly the standard the law holds you to.

We benchmark your plan’s costs against comparable plans and surface what you’re actually paying, so the fees are both defensible and, often, lower.

A plan employees actually use

A well-run plan still fails if nobody participates. We support enrollment meetings, one-on-one employee guidance, and sensible defaults — automatic enrollment and escalation where appropriate — because the plan exists to retire your people, not to sit in a drawer.

Plan design that lowers your risk

The right default investment, a clean fund menu, and thoughtful auto-features do double duty: they improve outcomes for employees and reduce the decisions that create sponsor liability. We review plan design alongside the investments, because the two problems are really one.