Trustee Empowerment & Protection, Inc. has launched a new, investment advisory service – The Trustee Empowerment Engagement^SM – for 401(k), 403(b), and 457 plan sponsors and trustees. It’s an internet-only, interactive cloud-based service that empowers plan sponsors and trustees (you) to quickly and easily internally evaluate how good (or not so good) your plan’s investment choices actually are and help you select better ones. It also effectively filters out all conflicts of interest that could be unnecessarily degrading your plan’s investment performance and making your Plan and you potentially vulnerable to legal claims and liability. You can now quickly and easily monitor and exercise your ERISA-mandated fiduciary oversight over plan’s investment selection decision making and better perform the important role your plan’s participants are counting on you to perform.

Here’s why this new service and the power it provides is so important and needed by your plan (and you):

• Plans without investment advisors. For plans not large enough to have the help of a professional investment advisor, this new service gives you the training, information, and tools needed to independently monitor and improve the investment choices within your plan. Whether or not you have an advisor, you have a legal duty to offer good investment choices to your plan’s participants and to remove poor performing ones. You can now provably demonstrate that you are doing both.
• Better exercise your fiduciary oversight over your plan’s investments selection and performance monitoring. Plans with investment advisors are legally required to exercise oversight over their advisor’s activities and recommendations and yet have lacked any way to effectively do so. Almost all plan sponsors and trustees feel that they have litlle alternative but to blindly rely on the advice of their single investment advisor, with no way to independently determine just how good the advice and recommendations they’re getting actually are. This new advisory service now enables you to do so.
• Improve your plan’s investment choices and investment performance. For both large and small plans, this new service enables you to quickly and easily see how you can improve your plan’s investment choices to better match the needs and goals of your plan’s participants. The performance gaps you’ll see, between your plan’s current choices and better alternatives, are often shockingly large. The improved results possible for your plan’s participants will almost always prove superior to the generic, one-size-fits-all choice options of many 401(k) providers.
• Reduce your vulnerability to class-action lawsuits. The largest of the growing number of class-action lawsuits now being brought against plan sponsors and trustees personally are for chronic underperformance of the investment choices within their plans. Under federal law (ERISA) plan sponsors and trustees (you) have an affirmative duty to remove bad investment choices from your plan. Poor performing investment choices not only harm your plan’s participants, they also make you vulnerable to class-action lawsuits and potentially significant economic and reputational damage. You can now independently identify and remove chronically underperforming choices.
• The reliance on the advice of your plan’s single investment advisor does not provide a complete defense of a charge of fiduciary imprudence regarding your investment choice-related decision making. The Courts have ruled that something more is needed – i.e., that trustees (you) must have some means to ensure that your reliance on the advice of your plan’s investment advisor is reasonably justified. This new service provides you with the needed “means” to do so.

What the plan sponsor and trustees (you) will get in a year-long engagement is:

• Direct, 24 / 7 interactive internet access to the Professional RapidReview Tool^SM (“ProRRT^SM”) created and licensed to us by Decision Technologies Corporation, for one designated operator, for a 12-month period.

The Tool’s patented decision-assistance technology enables you to quickly and easily score and rank your plan’s investment choices, not just in comparison to a benchmark index, but against all other available mutual funds and ETFs within each asset class. This technological capability has never before been directly offered to plan sponsors and trustees and is currently available nowhere else at any price.

• Initial training in the selection and weighting of the up to 48 performance factors that can be used to score and rank your plan’s investment choices, your way.
• The initial training can be recorded and serve as a reference manual for the designated user / operator.
• Periodic advice and Q&A sessions regarding the use of the ProRRT^SM, especially useful in preparation for meetings with your plan’s investment advisor.

What does it cost to do it ourselves? The annual fee for the service, training, and support is $4999 (which includes the $2,999 cost of the technology license). The license fee and initial training – $3,499 – is payable up front, and the remainder is payable in quarterly installments of $500 thereafter. Importantly, although the fee can be paid by the plan sponsor, it need not be since, as an investment advisory service, the fee is a legitimate expense of the plan.

Plans of all sizes need this, not just small plans.

This service is not being offered as a replacement or substitute for your plan’s current investment advisor. Instead, the engagement provides you with a quick and easy way to internally generate an empowering “second opinion” on investment choice retention, termination, and replacement questions and your advisor’s recommendations. This knowledge is power you can use to both better protect yourself and your plan, as well as to help improve the investment results and retirement security for your plan’s participants.

If you would prefer a licensed and qualified advisor perform the reviews for you and your plan, that too can be arranged. Just contact us for a quote.

For more information and to sign up, please go to https://tepi.tech

Or contact: Eric Smith, President of Trustee Empowerment & Protection, Inc.

esmith@tepi.tech // 248-797-0500