At Multnomah Group, our focus is you, the plan sponsor. Our mission is to help clients develop and maintain successful retirement savings programs by providing thorough, practical solutions that meet their objectives. Our role is to impartially assist our clients in developing and monitoring a high-quality plan for their participants. We believe that successful retirement plans are the result of thoughtful plan sponsors making informed and prudent decisions about their plan. We help our clients prudently monitor all aspects of their plan, including investment managers, recordkeepers, and participant education service providers. We develop objective processes to help clients select recordkeepers and measure the work they provide to the plan and its participants.
Multnomah Group provides plan specific fee benchmarking analysis to assist our clients in meeting the fee reasonableness standard. We use proprietary market pricing data to estimate the fee range specified in our analysis report.
Our goals in providing the annual fee benchmarking analysis to our clients are as follows:
Conducting a vendor search can be a detailed, time-intensive process. If the vendor search warrants the selection of a new vendor, the conversion process requires significant planning time and may have a dramatic impact on the participant-user experience. A properly guided vendor search and implementation may result in:
The most crucial element of any retirement benefit plan is how successfully and efficiently it drives benefits to its participants. Multnomah Group’s consultants and subject matter specialists have a wealth of experience in designing all types of qualified and non-qualified retirement benefit and incentive programs. In our work with clients, we have found the design of the retirement plan to be the primary determinant of a plan’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, many employers choose to focus on the rate and methodology of the employer contribution, while neglecting other factors that have an equivalent impact. Features such as negative enrollment, automatic escalation, and plan leakage affect participant success as much as contribution rate and methodology. We assist plan sponsors in evaluating the design of their plan with a lens focused on all the aspects of design that impact their employee population.
In addition to the services we offer to help plan sponsors with their fiduciary duties to their plan, we create and share resources throughout the year that help navigate to the responsibilities facing plan sponsors as it relates to their retirement plan benefit programs.
A: Each year we provide a plan-specific fee benchmarking analysis to assist our clients in meeting the fee reasonableness standard. We use proprietary market pricing data to inform the fee range specified in our benchmarking report. Further, our analysis provides a summary of both investment management and plan service fees, which typically include recordkeeping, administration, employee education, communication, and compliance services.
Our goals in providing the annual fee benchmarking analysis to our clients include:
Our process for helping clients determine the reasonableness of fees promotes the likelihood of the best possible outcomes for plan participants.
Multnomah Group has developed a customized request for proposal process designed to match the specific needs of our clients with vendors in the marketplace. Our tenured team has worked at a number of recordkeepers, giving us an in-depth look into their organizations. Multnomah Group maintains a proprietary database on recordkeeper general capabilities that gives us an edge on understanding their inner-workings, areas where they excel, and potential shortfalls. Multnomah Group’s director of vendor services has conducted a wide array of search projects for retirement plans and will lead all search projects. Importantly, we are an independent firm and can assist the committee in reviewing the entire spectrum of vendors.
The process we have developed when conducting a full-scope vendor RFP evaluation is as follows:
Director of Vendor Services
Director of Client Services
Consulant
Senior Consultant and Director of Technical Services