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Retirement Planning > Saving for Retirement

‘No Question’ Wealth and Retirement Are Converging: Bill Crager

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Financial advisors are increasingly being called upon by their clients to provide service across a broader range of topics, and according to Envestnet CEO Bill Crager, there’s a particular demand for support on all things retirement.

Crager and his team wrapped up their 2023 Elevate conference late last week in Denver, and among the many product enhancements and partnerships revealed by the firm was a new integration with Empower.

During the conference’s opening keynote address and in a subsequent interview with ThinkAdvisor, Crager took time to highlight the importance of the collaboration with Empower, which stands among the U.S.’s largest retirement plan service providers.

According to Crager and other leaders, the partnership will see Empower integrate its administration technologies and asset management capabilities within the Envestnet ecosystem. The ensuing partnership will expand both firms’ distribution opportunities, Crager said, while also providing a powerful solution for wealth managers who have traditionally shied away from serving plan sponsors and participants.

As recounted in the Q&A interview below, Crager sees the retirement marketplace as an important domain of growth and competition for wealth managers, and this helps to explain the collaboration with Empower. However, he emphasized, “retirement” will continue to mean very different things for different clients, and that fact will require advisors to be responsive and embrace new technology solutions.

For business owners, “retirement” may be more about efficiently starting and operating a defined contribution retirement plan while also planning for their own eventual transition away from company ownership. For wealthy late-career professionals, tax efficient investing and income planning is an essential “retirement” topic, as are estate planning preparations and the pursuit of charitable giving.

Finally, mass affluent and middle-income Americans have their own “retirement” needs that tend to involve goal-setting, budgeting and other shorter-term financial wellness matters.

Ultimately, with a smart client service approach and an embrace of emerging technology solutions, advisors can position themselves to compete effectively across all these areas, Crager said, and this will become an essential part of doing business as well-equipped and forward thinking firms seek to break down some of the traditional barriers that have existed between retirement and wealth.

As Crager put it, the topic of retirement is about as good a lens as any to understand the pressures and opportunities facing advisor professional in the years ahead.

THINKADVISOR: There are a lot of firms and executive leaders in the advisor marketplace today talking about a “convergence” of wealth management and retirement planning. Do you subscribe to that outlook?

Bill Crager: Yes, I really do, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m excited about the Empower partnership and why I emphasized it during my opening presentation here at the Elevate conference. I think that’s one of the most exciting partnership announcements we are sharing this week.

If we think about our advisor-clients, we know that many of their own best clients on the wealth management side are those small- and medium-sized business owners. We also know that many attractive potential wealth clients in the high-net-worth and ultra-high net worth market tend to be entrepreneurs.

What does that mean? It means they have their own employees, and in today’s environment, they need to offer decent retirement plans to keep these employees loyal and happy. So, from our perspective as a service provider to financial advisors, it just makes sense for us to work to offer a more turnkey approach to serving workplace retirement plans.

The blend of our proprietary technologies with Empower’s capabilities will help advisors to service new and existing retirement plans with much less of an administrative burden.

I see this as an essential service offering, and I think it’s fair to say that Ed Murphy and his leadership team at Empower see things the same way.

Beyond making their business-owner clients happy, do you think some wealth advisors today continue to underestimate the opportunities that can come along with serving retirement plan participants?

Yes, I think that’s right, too. Part of the reason why it’s important for today’s advisors to be able to serve retirement plan participants is that this is a pathway to create relationships with the future mass affluent.

As many people establish themselves in their careers and move up the economic scale, that retirement account is the first place where they hold substantial wealth. If you as the advisor can help serve that account while also bringing all these other service areas to the table, that’s going to be really powerful.

That’s what we are striving to accomplish across the Envestnet ecosystem. We call it the intelligent financial life — where everything is connected across your goals, your sources of wealth, your insurance protections and everything.

On the retirement front, I would say, we are still somewhat in the early days of establishing this connection, but the Empower relationship really speeds us up quite a bit. We’ve got a great technology stack and we are moving closer every day to creating that one true wealth hub. We’re right there.

Can you please reflect on the challenge of breaking down silos in the advisor industry? You spoke about this a lot during your opening keynote presentation.

The first thing to emphasize is that breaking down silos is incredibly important for our client outcomes and our success in the advisor industry, but it’s also really hard to do, and I believe that is one of the things that makes us unique here at Envestnet.

Other firms are investing in technology, but in my opinion, they aren’t integrating and bringing everything together in the way we are. We have been pushing so hard to not just make acquisitions but to truly create a holistic ecosystem for the advisors and broker-dealers.

I would say that, maybe two years ago, we were still doing a lot of road-mapping and strategizing about how to fit everything together in the best way possible. Now, in late April or early May 2023, our execution risk has, frankly, been dealt with. It really feels like the it’s time to turn the key and unleash the full capabilities of our unified platform. That’s what we are emphasizing here at the Elevate conference in 2023.

One concrete way this is being manifested is the expanded Insights Engine capability that I spoke about. It is now able to intelligently consolidate data from a very wide set of sources, and it can help the advisor identify very specific actions to help a client across their entire financial life. Whatever opportunities the clients have, we can help you as the advisor to identify them and take action.

The Insights Engine is currently generating millions of potential action items for advisor on a daily basis across 95 different subject areas. This will grow to hundreds of areas in the future.

Finally, can you tell us more about the newly revealed relationship with FNZ? How did that come about given the firm’s international roots?

So the first thing to mention is that Adrian Durham, the group CEO at FNZ, has helped to guide the creation of a platform that works across 27 national geographies — each with their own regulatory situation, different trading requirements and evolving tax laws.

It’s just a very impressive group, and they have a similar perspective as we do about breaking down silos and bringing together technologies as the key to the future.

Adrian and I first met probably 12 years ago in an Indian restaurant after a mutual friend put us together with the suggestion that we might have a lot to talk about. So, we just stayed connected over that time and once Adrian and his team felt they were ready and confident to break into the U.S., our scale and our prior relationship made Envestnet the logical choice.

Moving forward, FNZ will be another custody choice on our platform, just like Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing or others. The real difference is that FNZ is a digital-first provider that can help advisors really condense the administrative pain that the clients and advisors both feel when they are trying to open new accounts.

Their process shortens what traditionally may have taken several days down into a matter of minutes. It’s that efficient.

(Pictured: Bill Crager of Envestnet) 


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