Plan Sponsors

You’re responsible for picking a firm that has the experience and expertise you need.

However, it’s also important to pick a firm that is experienced in making retirement plan management easier for you.

This is what CRC has excelled at for nearly three decades.

3(38): A True Fiduciary Partner

At Capital Research + Consulting, we act as a 3(38) Fiduciary for your plan. Why is this important? Plan sponsors/trustees have personal liability for the assets in their company’s retirement plans. This is an area of real potential liability and many people don’t properly understand it.

As a 3(38) fiduciary, you’re able to delegate part of that fiduciary responsibility to CRC. We’ve acted as a co-fiduciary alongside our clients for almost three decades. We know what needs to be done to minimize your potential liability…and ours.

Our record shows how serious we are about this: no client in our 27 years of history has ever had a legal issue or claim arise.

Your Full-Service Solution

At Capital Research + Consulting, we excel at providing a true full-service solution with a personal touch. If you’re a plan sponsor, here’s what you can expect from us:

1. A thorough, proven process based on best practices.

There’s a lot of things in life that are great to do spontaneously, but managing a retirement plan is definitely not one of them. Potential liability can be created by not following best practices, not documenting steps, or by not closely complying with regulations.

At CRC, our job is to keep you and your plan compliant at each step. That’s what we do best. You’ll see that we constantly document our actions and yours, all to show adherence to regulations and best practices and to help avoid any future liability.

2. Cost and Vendor Management

Part of your responsibility as plan sponsor is to keep plan expenses in check. This is an area of recent litigation so it is especially important. As your partner, we help ensure that costs are well managed. We will periodically benchmark fees against similar plans to make sure your participants are getting value. When needed we’ll prepare RFPs, evaluate vendors and negotiate directly with them on your plan’s behalf. This saves you valuable time and helps ensure your participants are getting good value consistently.

3. Proactive Fund Monitoring

Fund selection and monitoring is another area of interest in recent lawsuits, so a high level of diligence is needed now more than ever. Unfortunately many times, fund problems are only detected after the fact. To provide a higher level of protection for both plan sponsors and participants, CRC has developed a proprietary fund monitoring system. We’ve identified a handful of signals funds tend to give off prior to underperforming. Once those signals alert, we research and recommend a suitable replacement. This proprietary alert system is one of the features unique to CRC.

4. Superior Investment Options for your participants

The goal of your retirement plan is to provide great outcomes for your participants. Unfortunately, most participants don’t know enough, or seek enough help, to invest appropriately for their circumstances. Traditionally target date funds have provided a simple alternative for these individuals. However the performance of these funds during times of market stress has not always been good and often these funds use expensive proprietary products, making them more costly than they need to be. At CRC, we’ve developed model portfolios using low-cost, high quality ETFs.  We’re proud to offer this cost-effective alternative for your participants.

5. Reports you can easily understand

You’re busy and you have better things to do than to hunt through giant binders to get the information you need. We understand that and provide you with executive reporting that is simple, summarized and easy to understand. This way you can stay informed and feel confident about the status of your plan.

6. Quarterly meetings

At CRC, we prioritize prevention. So meeting with you frequently and keeping you up to date is a priority. We do that with quarterly meetings. Whether these are at your location or by phone, we’ll spend the time needed to update you about your plan and on the issues and trends in the industry. This is a vital step to keeping you worry-free and addressing any concerns before they become problems.

7. Full-service, unlimited support

Mistakes can happen when communication between retirement plan sponsors and consultants break down. We want you to always feel comfortable picking up the phone or emailing us if you have questions or concerns, so unlimited support is included in our pricing.

Empowering Your Participants

At CRC, we realize the measure of your retirement plan is the number of successful outcomes. So we provide innovative, practical support to help make sure your participants have every chance to get prepared for the future.