Welcome to Betterment at Work

Video Transcript

Welcome, everyone. Welcome to Betterment. We are so happy you were able to join us today. First and foremost, I do wanna just give you a quick and brief introduction on your speakers for today's webinar.

Myself, my name is Lindi Johnson. I work on the 401k plan support team here at Betterment, to help you as the plan sponsor navigate your 401k and also making sure your employees are successfully able to set up their accounts and reach their retirement goals. I'm accompanied here by my colleague, Kevin Brown, who is a client success manager for Betterment at work, who does support our quick growing, large scale clientele here at Betterment. We are also accompanied by John and Troy who will be helping us in answering any questions that any of you may have.

If you do have any questions during the presentation, feel free to drop them in the chat, and we will be sure to get to those for you. However, enough about us, let's go ahead and get started, move on to what we will be discussing in today's webinar. So on today's agenda, We do have compliance and fiduciary reminders. Some employee engagement resources that you can share with your team, a demo of the plan sponsored dashboard, and what your most common tasks are going to be.

Lastly, what's next for this webinar? How Betterment is going to continue their engagement approach, and then also we're gonna end this webinar with some Q and A to make sure that we address everything that we may have missed to give you an opportunity to ask any other questions that you may have to note. Betterment will be sending out these slides after the presentation to allow you to have access to all the many resources that are available in them. So no need to worry if you're unsure where to find these. We will make sure that you do have access to them.

I'm gonna go ahead and pass it off to Kevin to go ahead and talk first about compliance and fiduciary reminders. Yes. Thank you so much, Lindi. We're gonna talk about clients and fiduciary reminders first, they're it's not the most interesting topic that we'll talk about today, but maybe one of the most important.

So another thing I wanted to mention too is we are recording this. So If you're attending, then you'll also get a copy of slides and a recording of this. So, few things that we need to talk about as planned administrators is, a few guidelines laid out laid out by the IRS. You need to make sure you're acting solely in the best interest of the plan and its beneficiaries.

That is your employees and coworkers. You need to make sure that the your purpose here is exclusively to provide the benefit to these employees. It's a great idea to reevaluate fees that you're paying for the plan every few years. And maybe even take a look at some other providers as well.

That's definitely the best thing to do as a fiduciary. It's also very important that you carry up the duties as an administrator with most importantly, for me, accuracy, mistakes can happen, and we can help you fix them. But they do just add some extra work to everyone's day. It's very important to make sure you are careful when maybe that's submitting contributions, inputting a higher date, whatever that might be, to carry out this plan see is is top of mind.

And then being familiar and following the plan document, plan document, I'm sure you well, if you haven't seen it, it's probably very, very long. But there is something else called a summary plan description, which can provide a really great guide to what you need to know about your plan as an administrator, and then diversifying investments. That's something that that Betterment actually does for you as a three thirty eight fiduciary. Now as a three sixteen fiduciary, they're slightly different.

The three sixteen, we typically handle reporting and disclosure requirements, the summary plan description, like I mentioned before, participant disclosures in the Form fifty five hundred. That's your 401k tax form. We carry out all those tasks and just depend on you to sign the fifty five hundred and distribute the materials. But we're the ones who actually create them for you, and maintain those as well.

While at three thirty eight, we assume liability for choosing the best and lowest cost investments. We actually take a look quarterly to make sure that we have the best performing that's following its index most accurately, and lowest cost investments. Generally speaking, we use mostly Vanguard and Black Rock ETFs. But they are subject to change as we see fit each quarter.

So some annual and evergreen responsibilities. These are things you need to worry about maybe each week, each day, each month, each year. First, we need to make sure that eligible employees are properly added and identified. So this one is definitely very important to auditors, when we've had DOL or just, fifty five hundred audits. We need to make sure that if someone reaches their eligibility, that they are added to the plan in a timely manner.

So we do offer a payroll integration here at Betterment, but that doesn't absolve you totally from this responsibility. Still do you need to have some oversight here to make sure that employees are being added to the plan in a timely manner. Next is also changing the deferrals and making sure that those are accurately represented in your payroll system. Again, the we do offer a payroll integration, but it's up to you, in order to have some oversight here and make sure that is actually working. Now we can always correct some mistakes, but, like I said before, it's better to head these off at the beginning than, having to correct them afterwards.

So I know I mentioned integrated plans a few times. We do have some manual upload plans too, where you can upload employees through an Excel document. And same thing here with contributions, after the employee makes a referral, then turn comes a contribution, and you can just upload a Excel document to us. Next few things are approving loans and distribution requests. We wanna make sure that the employees vesting is correct.

Maybe they are listed as terminated, but they actually still work at your company. That's why we have these loans and distributions requests out there for you to approve to make sure that, hey, this person's information is all correct. It's okay for me to remove these funds from the 401k. Can imagine it's pretty hard to get money back into the 401k once the participants removed it because you have to contact them and ask the nicely to get the money back.

So we wanna make sure that we do this right, first time, and that's why we have these requests here for you to approve. The last two are more compliance related. Need to review the compliance tests performed performed by Betterment. Some of you have been with Betterment last year.

You're probably receiving some of your compliance testing results now. Great idea to review those and review and approve any year end actions. Those are maybe sometimes a distribution from the plan or an additional additional money from the plan. As a result of the testing results.

And then finally, this will come this summer. There, we're going to sign an e file form fifty five hundred only takes about ten minutes, but Betterment prepares your fifty five hundred for you. And then we facilitate the signing through our partner FT William, Like I said, it only takes about ten minutes. Just create an account in FT William, click sign, and we'll file that for you with the DOL.

Alright. Next, I'll toss it over to Lindi for employee engagement. Awesome. Thanks, Kevin. So next, we're going to be talking about employee engagement.

And how we can work together to get your employees to make the most out of their 401k. The first thing we're gonna start on the topic of employee engagement is going to be automatic enrollment. Automatic enrollment is not only extremely beneficial for you as a company, but it's also extremely beneficial for your employees as well. We will discuss more on these benefits in the coming slide.

Betterment does take care of alerting your employees that they have been automatically enrolled in the 401k plan but it is also the company's responsibility to alert them of this as well. So if your plan does have automatic enrollment currently, We do still ask that the employees claim their employee account. What this means is that they will need to verify their identity in order to log in and make changes to their account, such as changing their contribution rate or selecting their investment portfolio. Most employees are automatically identified, but there are employees that will require further identification, which will require them to send us their ID in order for us to finish their account setup.

Even if they do not claim their account, it is good to note that there is going to be those automatic contributions still being made on behalf to their account. Also remember that employees are given notification from Betterment that they are auto enrolled at a certain percentage, but it is also important for you as a company to be a learning of this as well. Next slide, please. Alright.

So let's talk about the benefits of having automatic enrollment being a part of your plan. It is shown that plans with automatic enrollment do see on average eighty seven percent per participation rate versus only thirty seven percent participation rate for those who do not have automatic enrollment. Think of it this way. You are paying for a 401k benefit.

Don't you want your employees to use it? This is the best and most cost effective way to ensure that your employees utilize your company's 401k plan. Next, most employees when they are starting a new job, a 401k may not be very high on their priority list. But having automatic enrollment does assist them in having them already enrolled, so they no longer have to worry about it.

It is essentially one less thing that they can check off of their onboarding tasks when starting a new job. Another reason why having automatic enrollment is a great benefit is it provides you in helping you pass your annual compliance testing If you have a traditional plan, this is especially relevant for you. If you don't know what type of plan you have, feel free to reach out to plan support at Betterment dot com. And we can help you find this out.

Additionally, you may or may not have already heard. The Secure Act is going to require all new plans with an effective date of December 29, 2022 or later to have automatic enrollment required. It does not need to be in place until January 1, 2025. However, it is good to start thinking about this. Next slide, please.

Awesome. So Betterment does help out with sending some regular application to not only you as the plan sponsor, but your employees as well. However, it is also the company's responsibility to ensure participation in the plan and encourage it. Think of Betterment as a partner to your company.

Betterment is always here to help your plan succeed. However, we can do it without your help. On the screen, you're going to see a couple of sample emails that Betterment sends out regarding educating your employees and also assisting them enroll enrolling in the plan. I'm now gonna go ahead and pass it off to Kevin to speak about what you can do as a plan sponsor.

Thanks, Lindi. So there's many things you can do. Employee engagement is is what we're talking about now. And like Lindi said, you offer this great benefit It's a great idea to get your employees to use it.

It's been shown that a 401k can help retain employees. People do think financial wellness is an important aspect of their work. So some other things that Betterment assist you with is, during plan onboarding, we provide a suggested email template. And, like we mentioned before, these slides will be distributed too.

So you'll be able to actually click on this link. With this suggested email template here. And then for your employees who haven't claimed their account, they can contact support at Betterment. You can also resend the invitation to claim their account from the plan sponsor dashboard. If this employee hasn't claimed their account, again, claiming means, they logged in one for the first time.

Then you can resend them that invitation, but if they have logged in already, then the option won't be there. So it's, it's self explanatory here. And then each month we host a monthly webinar, among others, actually, just like this one, called getting started with Betterment. There's a a link here as well that is evergreen.

Meaning, you can sign up for any upcoming webinar over the next few months. There's one coming up in the first week of March. And, actually, there's one more too that we're hosting the first week of that are tax tips from some of our tax experts here at Betterment. So that'll be a great one to join too and hopefully help your employees get a little bit more engaged this benefit you're offering them.

And, you know, just become more familiar with the 401k. It can be daunting at first. So other things you can do is we have these one pagers. These are great things to add to maybe an employee handbook or just some onboarding materials.

And we've got them, customized, you know, sort of drilled down to fit your plan, whether that's an auto enroll with or without match, or maybe you don't have that or enroll, but have a match or maybe not. We've got a PDF for each of those, and that'll help folks get logged on and starting to invest with their 401k. Next we're gonna move to the plan sponsored demo. So I'm actually gonna be taking a look at our demo page here that looks just like your plan sponsor dashboard.

So when you first log in, you're brought to the home page here. This little house. And there's a just a general overview. Now, again, this is the demo.

So these are all fake numbers. No one's named, last name, first name, and all these folks have the same the same data here. Now this part this 401k plan's got a hundred percent participation rate, which I've never seen before, but your plan's got a hundred percent participation, and that's fantastic. This plan actually has a extra benefit called student loan management. That's, an additional benefit that we offer here through Betterment. You can definitely talk to us about that if you wanna add that to your plan. It's an additional cost, but something new that we've rolled out lately.

And then here we've got a couple more things, the last payroll amount, and then the total assets under management inside the 401k. So next, you'll probably see, at least we hope that you see this this task button here. There's a few tasks for this plan administrator to take care of. So first, I'll go to this distribution request. Now I mentioned distribution requests earlier, and we'd wanna make sure just by checking here that, hey, this person, first name, last name, is actually terminated, and they're trying to take their money out of the plan.

If all this looks okay, then we should approve the distribution. Then this will go out to that person's bank account. And if, you know, since it's their termination distribution, you might not ever, talk to that. Next in tasks, there's a pretty similar request here called loans. And you can see here there's pending loan request at the top, but we've already approved one in the past down here.

So we'll take a look at this pending loan request. Now here's this promissory note. When you come down here, it's a great idea to download this. The participant gets a copy as well, but great to keep for record keeping purposes.

So if all this looks good here, we can also approve this loan. And now we can see we've got two approved loans. Now over here, you can actually see the amortization schedule. Now I can't download this because it is the demo environment, but This will show the payment schedule for this person over the the length of the loan.

There's a funny term here as five remaining payments. You'll probably see something more like twenty four or forty eight, over the course of a few years. The payments will all occur during payroll, and you'll have to add this payment amount as a payroll deduction to this employee's profile in your payroll system. Now heading back to tasks that compliance testing actions due, I'm hoping a lot of you already have completed this. So I'll just click on it real fast just to just to show everybody what it looks like.

So we're just gonna be asking some questions here about, who are your owner and officers. Do we have your plan information correct, EIN, address, things of that nature. Do you wanna make an extra employee contribution who will sign your form fifty five hundred, and then we collect some information about your employees. Might be autofilled with some information already that we've gotten. Especially if your plans started midway through the year, or you don't have an integrated payroll, even if you do have an integrated payroll, it's a great idea to just take a look at these census these censuses, make sure the information is correct, and then send it back to us so we can test your plan with the most accurate information.

Heading back to tasks. One more thing is, like we mentioned before, we're a three sixteen administrator. Now we can create these disclosures for you, but it is up to you in order to distribute them. Some of them are posted on participant accounts like this QDIA and fee disclosure.

And since this is a demo, there isn't a summary plan description. There's no plan document for the demo plan, but this will be here as well for summary plan description. That's something else that's great to put in your onboarding materials when someone's just coming into the company or even just posting it each year when people are signing up during open enrollment in the fall during benefits time. Alright.

Now moving down next to employees, we can see here everyone's got the same name, and everything looks the same. Well, we actually click in here. I mentioned that you can resend an invitation. Now that'll be right here.

Online account access. This person's got their account created, but if they have not had that created, you'll be able you'll see a link here where you'll be able to resend that invitation. Now you can edit some things on their profile. Maybe the date of birth is wrong or their social is wrong, something of that nature.

The only thing you won't be able to edit is the email address. Just email plan support for that, and we'll get it changed for you. The employee can also change their own email address, by contacting support. Or or chatting with our support team as well.

And moving down a little bit further, here are their contributions. You are able to edit their contributions. Now you should only do this at the request of your employee. Maybe they're unable to get online.

We're still verifying their identity. And, you know, maybe they are auto enrolled at six, but wanna contribute eight, actually. So you can coming here and actually update their rate for them. Now if you're integrated, this will flow over to your payroll system automatically.

But if you're not, then you'll just need to go over to whatever it might be and enter this deduction amount in in your payroll. And moving down a little bit further, again, this is the demo. So there's not a ton of of information here, but you're able to see some of their activity the transactions that have occurred in their account. This person's had a hardship distribution.

There's some payroll contributions here. You can view their statements. A lot of auditors might ask for these. So they are available to you.

And if you have the auditor, then they're available to the auditor as well. And we can see a 401k loan. I'm not gonna be able to find those loans we just, approved, but here's where you can see where this person's loan is. One more time, you can also view the loans over here, 401k plans and loans.

I'm gonna continue down on the sidebar to payroll. So these are the only two payrolls that I've gone through so far. This but let's see last last two pay periods. If you click into this, we can see a little overview of what we've uploaded And I can tell these are uploaded actually.

I go back because this says CSV. If this was an integrated plan, it would not say CSV and the source would be your integrated payroll. So let me check-in here. We can see all the basic information that we might need: student loan repayments, Roth, Roth contributions, the gross compensation, for all of your employees, the effective date of the payroll, that is the check date of your payroll.

Total hours worked, and you'll be able to see who actually uploaded this. Again, if it's a manual upload, it'll say who it was here. And just include everyone's information here. So first is gross comp and hours, and then next is all of these, contributions and the student loan management as well.

Moving a little bit further will go to the 401k plan. So this might look a little bit similar to the home page, but does include just a bit more information. There's some year to date contributions by source here. So this particular plan hasn't made any employer contributions and all of their contributions thus far have been employee. They're split here between Roth and Traditional. So right down the middle. So for some plan activity, you might just want to look at this to see that there's been a hardship distribution that's occurred and a plan or a payroll contribution as well.

And then one more time, this is where we found the distribution request. Remember I already approved it, so it's no longer there. And then loans, we approve that one here, and now it's moved down to the approved loan section. As another review, this is where that compliance questionnaire was.

Before I had clicked on them in tasks, but this is where you can actually find all of those tasks under 401k plan. So this is that other benefit I mentioned. It is an additional cost, but it allows your employees to pay back their student loans. If you want some more information about that, just ask and and we can provide that. Next is some resources. Now these are resources for you as an administrator, then these are for your employees.

These are some pretty helpful FAQs and folks can search a topic that they're looking to learn more about. Same thing goes for this plan sponsor or plan administrator help page. Now reports, this is a pretty powerful page. It can take a a bit of time to master.

Where you can run all these reports with all sorts of information that we supply. Now I don't expect you to know what all these mean, but I think some of the most useful ones will be current deferral rates. That'll just show what everyone's deferral rates are right now.

Participant contribution summary. You can pick two dates, and it'll sum each person's contributions so you can look at the totals. That each person has contributed between x date and x date. And then finally, the participant master, this will show total balances between x date and x date. So I'd encourage you to take a look at this and just play around and run some different reports.

You can always, I won't run them here because it is a demo environment, but you can always run them as many times as you'd like. And then documents, we already looked at this when I clicked on that task But here's where your documents are. It's under resources, and then finally support. This is where you can find our contact information.

So this is for employers. This is for employees. Just notice these numbers are pretty close. This one's for employees. It has a one at the end, and the employers is a zero at the end.

And then finally, here's some just FAQs here. What should you do with some of those documents that we supply as your three sixteen administrator. And then finally, if we need to add additional administrators or plan managers here, then we can click on manage access. So what I did is I clicked on settings and now manage access here.

So there's only one right now. But if we add a new plan manager, we can put input their information and then choose their role. So you'll see 3 roles here. View only staff and administrator.

View only is pretty self explanatory. They can just view. They cannot make any changes. Staff and administrator can make any changes available on the site.

The only difference here is that staff can't add more plan managers only administrators can add more plan managers. So once you invite this person, they'll get an email to join as a plan manager and create a log in and security questions as well. Alright. And going back here, this is as soon as I clicked on settings, you're brought to your profile.

You can actually edit your email preferences. Maybe you've got a few different plan managers and one's a one's a payroll person and one's a recruiter and they're adding only new employees. Well, that recruiter might not need the the payroll emails. So they can actually edit these and and turn them off.

Maybe the payroll person too doesn't really care about employees distributions. They can turn those off as well. I know we might send a lot of emails, so hopefully that alleviates some, gives you some more room in your inbox. And then you can change your bank account at any time.

I would just give it about one business day before you run payroll. If you are changing your bank account information. Now for security purposes, you cannot see the account number, only change it. So just something to note is that, you know, we we don't want to put that on a poster.

I don't know, who might be looking, who might be a plan manager, maybe you have an auditor here, that someone who you might want to add as view only would probably be an auditor. That way, they can take a look here and pull things as they as they need. And the last thing I'll say is, because I touch one more time on the the access portion. If you do wanna change someone's access level, that's not available right now.

So we'll just, you'll just need to contact support in order to change this role. That's the access level that I mentioned. The last thing here that, I'll touch on one more time is our payroll process. I know before I had mentioned that, with an inter or a non integrated plan, you need to upload an Excel document for to to give us the payroll contributions. That's found right here, upload payroll.

So we'll actually provide a payroll template for you. This payroll template is here under payroll details. And I won't download it again. This is the demo, but it'll include all your employees that are currently in the plan, and you'll be able to input their gross comp, hours, contributions, maybe an employer contribution, loan repayments, there'll be columns for each of these values.

And you'll just come back here to the overview and upload this payroll. Now here we can see that this particular demo plan is linked with ADP Workforce Now. We have a number of integrations. If, you know, this includes Gusto, Zenefits, Paylocity, Rippling, things like that.

If you're considering switching your payroll system, I'd say reach out to us as well and we can let you know who we integrate with because it is a really powerful tool that that takes away some of your daily responsibilities as administrator. And moves them to more, more oversight, capacity. So that, that concludes my demo. So I'll head back to the slides right now, and I'll toss it to Lindi for what's next.

Awesome. Thanks, Kevin. That was great. So next is pretty much how can we work together to get your employees to use the most out of their 401k?

We want to discuss how Betterment will be involved in an ongoing engagement approach to assist your company in getting the most out of your 401k plan. Betterment does have a dedicated communications team for our plan sponsors and participants, we do send regular communications to make sure you're always in the loop with everything. The emails do come from plan support at Betterment dot com. So make sure you have that email listed in your contacts to ensure that nothing goes missed.

These emails are very important, so please make sure that you keep an eye out for them. As a plan sponsor, we do send some marketing emails, but also some crucial plan specific information, as well as distribution requests and payroll confirmations and and definitely much more. Next slide, please. Awesome.

So you are also supplied with our very helpful online resources and articles. These can be found in your plan sponsor dashboard as Kevin demoed or on the Betterment website from the dashboard, you do have a section for resources for not only yourself, but also a section for your employees to assist you in any questions that your employees may have. These can be found on the dashboard by clicking the resources tab on the left hand side or just by visiting Betterment dot com slash work. Yeah.

And one one extra thing I want to mention about this is these communications just like the email you probably got for this webinar, come in this format. So just keep an eye out because like I said, I think there might be another reminder going out about our webinars in the first week of March. So if your employees don't know about them, please let them know that we're we're hosting some helpful webinars, just for them, actually. I just do need to go for our compliance team to this disclosures.

Disclosures page. So I'll come back to this if you do want to read it. Again, the slides will be distributed to you, but do need to show this for compliance purposes. Well, thank you all for joining, and I hope you all have a great rest of your week.