• LPL Financial is the largest independent broker/dealer in the country*
• LPL Financial supports their advisors and provides them with high-quality tools and services, and heightened best practices to deliver to plan sponsor
• Efficiencies created by our LPL partnership help save time, reduce exposure to fiduciary liability, and address ERISA, IRS, and Department of Labor compliance requirements

*As reported by Financial Planning magazine, June 1996-2019, based on total revenue.

Market volatility makes it critical for retirement plan sponsors and fiduciaries to develop and maintain investment due diligence procedures and supporting documentation. We assist you in preparing an investment policy statement, which acts as a guide to evaluate your current investment offerings, measure them against applicable indices, and view your existing provider’s complete menu, along with the broader universe of investment options. The result is confidence that your plan’s investments are diversified, well managed, and meet the stated objectives of your investment policy statement.

Bryson Wealth Management provides this comprehensive analysis by utilizing multiple tools, including Zephyr’s Style Advisor, one of the most robust investment analytical tools available.

Each investment is evaluated by more than a dozen different and objective analytical measurements, including:

• Upside & Downside Capture
• Style: Correlation & Style Drift
• Performance: Excess Return & Tracking Error
• Risk-Return: Standard Deviation, R-squared, Alpha, Beta & Sharpe Ratio

Standard deviation is a historical measure of the variability of returns relative to the average annual return. If a portfolio has a high standard deviation, its returns have been volatile. A low standard deviation indicates returns have been less volatile.

Alpha measures the difference between a portfolio’s actual returns and its expected performance, given its level of risk as measured by Beta. A positive (negative) Alpha indicates the portfolio has performed better (worse) than its Beta would predict.

Beta measures a portfolio’s volatility relative to its benchmark. A Beta greater than 1 suggests the portfolio has historically been more volatile than its benchmark. A Beta less than 1 suggest the portfolio has historically been less volatile than its benchmark.

The Sharpe ratio is a risk-adjusted measure of the excess return (or Risk Premium) per unit of risk in an investment asset or a trading strategy.

Congress has constantly burdened plan sponsors with an overwhelming volume of legislation, making continual review of retirement plans essential. Therefore, it is critical that the legal, compliance, and design aspects of a plan are current. We help you develop an organized, systematic, and periodic review process where every relevant feature is examined to provide an optimal plan. We review the design and operational features of your company’s plan from an objective perspective focusing on:

• Increasing participation
• Decreasing costs
• Alleviating the burden on benefit personnel
• Reducing trustee and fiduciary liability
• Providing innovative strategies designed to best meet your company’s needs

We will work with you to create a customized communication and education strategy designed to benefit you and your participants in the following ways:

• Increase participant satisfaction by informing participants of the valuable benefit you provide as well as educating, guiding, and motivating them to take full advantage of these plan benefits
• Address your fiduciary responsibilities by providing educational tools and resources to help your participants make informed decisions
• Develop a customized communication and education program tailored to the unique needs and knowledge level of each participant by using a variety of communication mediums including:
  – Group onsite meetings
  – Individual onsite meetings
  – Webinars
  – Print campaigns (posters, payroll stuffers, flyers, brochures)
  – Internet-based campaigns (HTML emails, online tools)
• Multilingual capabilities for all of the above
• Increase participant engagement by developing a schedule of ongoing participant education meetings
• Increase participant retirement readiness

Our service philosophy consists of assisting you in assessing, analyzing, and addressing the specific needs of your plan to help maximize its value to your organization. We strive to improve the overall effectiveness of your plan by helping you:

• Manage fiduciary risk
• Improve operational efficiency
• Increase employee satisfaction via customized education initiatives
• Streamline investment selection and analysis
• Identify and recommend cost efficiencies

• Consulting
• Ongoing support and education
• Conversion and installation assistance

Included in our ongoing services, we strongly recommend a regularly scheduled review of your retirement plan to address your fiduciary responsibilities. Our review covers all the key areas of plan operations, including:

• Investment consultation and review
• Fiduciary and compliance issues
• Participant education and communication
• Assessment of your plan design
• Quality of plan service

Your plan review and evaluation is followed by a customized action plan providing step-by-step guidance to ensure completion of any open tasks.

Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans

One of the most effective ways an employer can help executives to reach their target retirement goals is through nonqualified supplement executive retirement plans (SERPs). A SERP, also referred to as a Top Hat plan, is a deferred compensation agreement between a company and a key executive in which the company agrees to provide supplemental retirement income to the executive and their family if the agreed upon eligibility and vesting conditions are met. These are designed to restore benefits lost to regulatory restrictions on compensation used to calculate qualified pension benefits.

Formulas

There are many types of supplemental executive retirement plans, such as offset plans or excess benefit plans, and they may be tied to the employer’s qualified retirement plan. In calculating benefit formulas, employers may select a defined benefit or defined contribution. Defined benefit provides a stated monthly and annual amount at retirement, whereas defined contribution specifies a calculation based on lost benefits.

There are many plan versions and unlimited benefit and contribution formulas that may be used in plan design. Many companies base benefit formulas on a percentage of executive’s final five-year average compensation. What’s more, careful consideration of withholding rules, tax implications, and golden parachute payments is essential.