-
The 401(k) security briefing your plan sponsors need
The 401(k) security briefing your plan sponsors need AI-enabled fraud is targeting retirement plans. Here's how advisors can help sponsors. Retirement plans are a high-value, low-vigilance target: big balances, infrequent logins, and multiple service provider touchpoints. AI has made the fraud landscape meaningfully worse in the last 18 months. This is the security briefing your plan sponsor clients probably haven't gotten yet. Why 401(k) plans are uniquely exposed Retirement assets sit at the intersection of everything fraudsters look for: They're often a participant's second-largest asset after their home, logins are infrequent enough that losses can go unnoticed for weeks, and money moves through a chain—advisor, sponsor, recordkeeper, TPA. Fraudsters may use publicly available information to target participants, plan sponsors, and advisors. Here are 7 steps you can take to help protect your clients' security. The 2026 threat landscape The human verification layer that we’ve relied on for so long is no longer reliable. As AI capabilities increase, fraudsters are finding ways to target retirement plans. One type of attack involves voice-based phone calls, where a fraudster convincingly imitates a person's voice using AI, a technique known as a deepfake. Fraudsters are also using deepfake video and increasingly targeted social engineering, where attackers research their victims in advance to make impersonation attempts more convincing. Worryingly, deepfake identity fraud is on track to surge nearly 500% over the course of 2026. What regulators now expect The Department of Labor has issued cybersecurity guidance for ERISA plans that sets a clear bar for what plan sponsors should look for from providers. Key requirements include a documented security program, controls that match today's threat environment—multi-factor authentication (MFA), active monitoring, encryption—diligence on third-party vendors, and an incident response plan that's actually been tested, not just written down and filed away. You can learn more about the DOL guidance and how Betterment addresses it here. Your plan sponsor clients may not know this guidance exists. That's an opening: Cyber diligence is now part of what it means to select a prudent provider, and advisors who can walk sponsors through that checklist are delivering real value. Practical protection for participants Most retirement-plan fraud doesn't come from databases getting breached. It comes from people getting tricked—a convincing phone call, a fake login page, a weeks-long relationship that turns out to be a scam. The basics go a long way: Turn on MFA—app-based, not just SMS. Use a password manager. Add a trusted contact to the account. Check the account balance and activity once a quarter. None of these are complicated, but few participants have done all four. If a participant's email gets compromised, here's the playbook to walk them through: Lock down access. Help them reset credentials to their email account, the plan portal, and any other financial institutions. Force a logout of all active sessions. Re-enroll MFA from a different device. If the attacker had access to the phone or computer the client normally uses, that device may still be compromised—and any new MFA factors enrolled on it could be captured too. Use a phone, tablet, or computer the attacker hasn't touched. Brand-new isn't required; just different. Audit the last 30–90 days. Look at distributions, loans, beneficiary designations, and address changes. Watch for rollover requests. They're the most common follow-on to an account takeover — flag anything that comes in shortly after. Document everything and notify the recordkeeper and the plan sponsor. The paper trail matters. How sponsor-level controls work A key control in managing a retirement plan is the application of access controls to ensure that high-risk activities are restricted to authorized parties. Roles such as advisors or plan sponsors may be established with some plan administration capabilities; however, transactions such as distributions, signer changes, plan amendments, and payroll-related changes require authentication directly from the plan sponsor. A forwarded email, even one that looks completely legitimate, does not authenticate a transaction. The reason the line is drawn there is to make social engineering hard. Fraudsters try to impersonate advisors, plan sponsors, and service providers. How to use this in your practice Security is a natural way to reopen a conversation with plan sponsors who haven't reviewed their provider in a while. The entry point isn't "you should switch providers"—it's "when was the last time anyone walked you through the cyber-diligence side of your plan?" Betterment's Trust Portal and the 401(k) security brochure give sponsors something concrete to work from. Both are available through your Client Success Manager or at trust.betterment.com. Ready to bring a sponsor into the conversation? If you already have an account with Betterment Advisor Solutions, use the Request a Proposal button in your advisor dashboard—it reaches the right team within one business day. If you or a plan sponsor that you support would like to access documentation to support due diligence activities, the Betterment trust portal can be used to access independent SOC audit reports, key policies, and other supporting documentation. If you're exploring offering a 401(k) with Betterment for the first time, learn more here.
-
What’s new from Betterment Advisor Solutions
What’s new from Betterment Advisor Solutions More advisor control and automation across onboarding, portfolio management, and billing with smarter allocations, migration insights, and streamlined invoicing. Get more control and automation at every step of the client experience. Now you can onboard clients with smarter initial allocations, migrate accounts with deeper portfolio insights, and enable itemized invoices at every fee assessment. Table of contents Portfolio management Smarter initial allocation Increased visibility on portfolio changes Upcoming: Fully Paid Securities Lending Program Billing New: Client invoices Onboarding Docusign on client agreements Integrations Slant Greenboard Retirement AI plan benchmarking How Defining Wealth built a retirement practice from scratch using our platform Top content How a former Dimensional VP kept his investment philosophy and now runs a lean, modern practice on Betterment Tax-smart charitable giving for your clients Launching soon: AI-powered onboarding, direct indexing & unified managed accounts Smarter initial allocation Select a portfolio strategy and Betterment will assign an appropriate starting risk level based on account type, goal, and time horizon. You can always override it, but the initial allocation work is done for you. Clients’ accounts land in a smarter starting default, and you can deliver consistency across your entire book. Increased visibility into bulk portfolio migrations Get a clear view of how portfolio changes will affect clients at scale before execution. The bulk migrations flow now surfaces expanded details on your selected migration strategy, including rebalancing status, gains allowance remaining, and the number and types of accounts impacted. Log in to explore now You can now enroll clients in our Securities Lending Program Your clients will be able to earn additional income on eligible shares they already hold through our upcoming Fully Paid Securities Lending (FPSL) Program. Through FPSL, clients can lend fully paid stocks and ETFs from their Betterment account to institutional borrowers. Your clients will share the income generated from these loans, while maintaining economic ownership of their investments including the ability to sell their shares at any time. Enrollment is open now; lending and payouts will begin once the program launches, with Betterment facilitating the process, making it easier for both clients and advisors. Learn more Automated client invoices Starting in July, you can automatically generate and deliver itemized client invoices at the time of every fee assessment, so you can focus on your clients—not your compliance checklist. Each invoice includes billing period dates, total fees assessed, fee formula, AUM basis, and itemized Betterment and advisor fees. Invoices are published in your dashboard and in your client’s documents tab with optional email notification, helping ensure consistent delivery of required billing details. Explore billing Client agreements with Docusign Docusign is now integrated into client onboarding and account opening. You can send client agreements for electronic signature, capturing the client's name, initial, email and the date signed. You can also maintain multiple versions of your client agreement, designating one as the firm default and selecting the right version for each household at onboarding. Through the new Client packages tab, you’ll have access to all of your households’ signed agreements, with the ability to review timestamps, and download individual or bulk pdfs. Each package includes client agreements plus key Betterment documents such as Form ADV, Form CRS, and the privacy policy. Explore our client agreement automation Two new integrations that help you streamline manual tasks Slant: Get a clearer view of what needs your attention. Slant combines CRM, AI note-taking, data enrichment, and project management in one platform. You can interact with client records, automate workflows, and surface next steps without manual CRM upkeep. Greenboard: Simplify compliance monitoring with the ability to access Betterment data. Greenboard pulls account information through the ByAllAccounts feed at no additional cost, helping reduce manual oversight and streamline compliance workflows. View all integrations AI-powered benchmarking With our new AI-powered benchmarking tool, you can easily contextualize how a plan's participation and contribution rates stack up against national benchmarks. The refreshed plan sponsor dashboard brings everything else into focus too, putting priority tasks, plan insights, and payroll status in one place, so sponsors and advisors can quickly see what needs attention. How Defining Wealth expanded into 401(k)s without growing headcount Jacob Gardner, co-founder of Defining Wealth—an RIA serving Millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs in Nashville—needed a 401(k) solution for his business-owner clients but lacked retirement plan infrastructure and a team already stretched to capacity. That’s when he turned to a platform he was already familiar with. With Betterment, he launched three plans without adding headcount. The setup was straightforward. Jacob stepped into the 3(38) investment manager role, taking full discretionary authority over plan investments, while Betterment handled compliance and day-to-day operations as the 3(16) partner. That meant he could expand into retirement services without hiring a specialist, building new infrastructure, or disrupting what was already working. Learn more about our 401(k) solution One custodian, no excess overhead When Massimiliano De Santis, a former vice president at Dimensional Fund Advisors, launched his own RIA, he set out to find a partner that could keep the practice lean without compromising his investment approach. He chose Betterment Advisor Solutions as his sole custodian, a platform uniquely suited to his clientele that took on the day-to-day execution of investment management, compliance recordkeeping, reporting, and back office operations, while the investment thinking remained entirely his own. The result was a self-sustaining practice that freed him to focus on what matters most, building client relationships and driving growth. Take a look inside his practice What's next for our portfolio management suite Portfolio management is entering a new phase. For years, advisors have had to choose between automation and control, stitching together different systems to get the flexibility, tax optimization, and customization they needed. What we demoed live earlier this month represents one built-in system where high-growth firms can thrive — new advisor controls, expanded portfolio construction capabilities, and deeper tax-smart automation designed to help firms personalize more without sacrificing scalability. Here's what's live, what's launching soon, and why it adds up to something advisors don't want to miss: AI-powered onboarding, direct indexing, unified managed accounts, and new tax simulation tools. Watch a preview Why charitable giving may be your most underutilized client conversation Bring tax-smart charitable giving into client conversations with Daffy, a modern donor-advised fund platform available on Betterment that helps advisors integrate giving into broader planning strategies. In a recent webinar, Betterment sat down with Adam Nash, CEO and co-founder of Daffy, to discuss the case for DAFs in today’s tax landscape. They covered real client scenarios, including tax-efficient rebalancing, contribution bunching, and high-income year planning. The session also provided an overview of Daffy’s platform and how advisors can incorporate charitable giving into their planning conversations. Watch the webinar Log in to explore what’s new, or reach out to your relationship manager if you’d like to take a closer look at any of these features. If you’d like to take a look around with someone from our team, book a demo.
-
What breakaway advisors experience when they start up with Betterment
What breakaway advisors experience when they start up with Betterment A practical guide for breakaway advisors on how to launch the right way—and what to expect when you do. Going independent is one of the biggest professional decisions an advisor can make. The planning phase—after you've decided but before you've made the move—is where the foundation gets built. The platform you choose, the technology you set up, and the client transition process you design will shape your first year and beyond. For breakaway advisors facing hundreds of tech decisions with limited operational experience, the goal is to find a foundation that doesn't require you to stitch tools together—and a custodial partner invested in your success from day one. With Betterment Advisor Solutions, advisors don't just get infrastructure—they get a partner that brings dedicated service and support and built-in tax optimization to every client interaction, from the moment of onboarding through every growth phase ahead. We sat down with our Platform Solutions team to find out what it’s really like to transition to Betterment. What does the onboarding process look like when you first join Betterment Advisor Solutions, and how long does it take to get up and running? We can have a new firm set up in about 15 minutes. Once an advisor signs up, and we review their ADV and filings, the account will be activated and they can log in. Setting up an account involves a few steps: The advisor uploads their business logo, gets their agreements in place, sets up billing preferences, and starts building their firm’s custom portfolios (if desired). With a bit of planning, a firm-specific setup could happen in an hour. For advisors who have just completed registration and are racing to onboard their first clients, that speed is meaningful. You're not waiting weeks to get operational. How does Betterment support the client transition process, from account opening to ACATS transfers? The transition process is one of the things I'd highlight as a real differentiator with Betterment. Everything is digital. For many advisors, that alone is a departure from the paper-heavy processes they're used to. Account opening takes just a few minutes, and we have a paperless ACATS workflow that makes moving assets over pretty straightforward. The platform supports a wide range of ETFs, mutual funds, and stocks. Our team will help create a custom migration plan based on the portfolio strategies you plan to use for your client. What I think advisors really appreciate is what happens after the assets land. You choose a tax-aware migration strategy and set a gains allowance for each client, and the system transitions accounts accordingly. Smart tax lot selection is embedded in automated rebalancing transactions, so it avoids short-term capital gains and only triggers long-term gains up to the budget you’ve set. Before anything gets sent to the client, you get a full review. At that point, you can update settings, check the transfer details, and only then send the request over. You're always in control of what goes out, and it’s all completely digital and easy for the client to authorize with a few clicks. The same logic applies when you're updating a portfolio strategy on an existing goal. You can review and edit rebalancing settings the same way. What does day-to-day practice management look like on the platform once you're live with clients? Once you're live, day-to-day management all runs through Co-Pilot, which is essentially your command center for tracking client activity and anything that needs your attention, all in one place. The experience is fully digital and vertically-integrated, so you're not bouncing between systems. You can act on individual accounts or work in bulk with scaled tools, depending on what the day calls for. The biggest difference with Betterment is automation. When you're building a firm from scratch, often with a lean team, automation isn't just nice to have. It's what makes the economics of a new independent practice actually work. Say a client calls and wants to put $5,000 into their IRA. Instead of your team needing to log in and invest the cash by manually buying securities, the deposit is automatically invested according to the portfolio strategy and allocation you’ve selected for the client. Fee calculations, account rebalancing, the ongoing maintenance work—it's all handled. But the key is that it’s flexible. You can customize the automation, break things into manual processes when you want more control, or turn it off entirely. It's really the best of both worlds. How does automated rebalancing work, and how much time does it save advisors on portfolio maintenance? Automated rebalancing is one piece of a broader suite of tax-smart portfolio management tools that all work together behind the scenes. Betterment offers both reactive rebalancing (using deposits, withdrawals, and dividend reinvestments to minimize drift) and proactive rebalancing (based on drift triggers you can customize as needed). It even handles complex situations like concentrated stock positions or inherited portfolios. Multiply that across a full book of clients, and the time savings—plus the after-tax performance impact—are significant. For a firm without a large operations team, this is the infrastructure that lets you manage a full book of clients without proportional headcount. What does the tax-smart transition process look like from the advisor's perspective, and how do you communicate it to clients? From the advisor side, you're never doing this alone—you have a dedicated Platform Solutions manager guiding the transition, plus relationship management and customer support as backup. The tax-smart tooling itself is comprehensive, and included with the platform fee: tax-loss harvesting, asset location, smart tax lot selection, gains allowances, sell-only substitutes, and rebalancing, all working together. This isn't a bolt-on feature set—tax-efficient investing has been part of how Betterment was built from the beginning, which means advisors can deliver genuinely personalized, tax-aware advice at scale. On the client communication side, we've found that clients who receive clear, thoughtful comms ahead of a transition are rarely upset by the process. They actually appreciate it. We give advisors the resources to make that easy: onboarding videos, communication templates, and plenty of lead time to address questions before they come up. When clients see how carefully the transition has been planned, it builds trust right from the start. What level of human support is available to advisors, and how quickly can you reach someone when you need help? Going independent doesn't mean going it alone. On average, it takes about a minute to answer your call, and under one business hour to answer emails.* You have a dedicated Platform Solutions manager guiding the transition, plus relationship management and customer support as backup. How does the platform integrate with the tools advisors are already using, like their CRM, financial planning, and compliance software? Betterment is a vertically-integrated custodian. Our platform is built to fit into the workflows you already have rather than replace them. Our integrations automatically connect Betterment accounts to your existing CRM, financial planning software, and compliance tools, so client information, investment holdings, and account activity all show up in your dashboards without extra legwork. The great thing about the platform is that it has all you need to launch or transition your existing practice, with the ease and sophistication of Betterment’s technology as the foundation. What does the client-facing experience look like, and how do clients typically respond to the new experience during a transition? The client experience is honestly one of Betterment's biggest differentiators for advisors. Betterment was built as a consumer platform first, so the app and web experiences have always been at the forefront of what we do. Clients can also sign up, link their accounts, and start navigating on their own without needing to call anyone for help, which takes routine onboarding tasks off your team’s plate so they can focus on what clients are really paying for: advice. As for moving clients onto the platform, the main concerns are usually: how long will this take, and will my clients push back against the change? But we’ve found when advisors communicate clearly and confidently, clients tend to follow their lead. What does a compliant transition actually require? A compliant transition typically unfolds over 90 days—reviewing your employer agreement, forming your entity, getting registered, and building out the business infrastructure you need to operate. For a full step-by-step breakdown, see our guide. *Based on Betterment internal data October 2025 - March 2026.
