When Jared Heitzman sits down with employees enrolled in his organization’s workplace retirement savings plan, they often have one burning question on their minds — and it’s not about retirement.
“Hey,” they ask, “who do you work for?”
Heitzman, a certified financial planner, explains that he works for the retirement savings plan that they and some 170,000 other workers use to save for retirement.
And, he adds, he contributes to the very plan that they do: the $11 billion Adventist Healthcare Retirement Plans, a multiple employer plan that covers the employees of three sprawling hospital systems.
Once they realize that he’s not a vendor but an employee of the same plan, participants relax, knowing that they’re not “going to feel any kind of pressure to purchase something at the end,” Heitzman said.
They realize “this guy’s not going to try to sell me an annuity. He’s not going to try to sell me life insurance. He’s not going to try to gather any of my outside assets,” Heitzman said.
Heitzman is one of 10 in-house financial educators at AHRP whose sole focus is to help participants understand how their plan works and the investment options available. They also help with retirement income planning. The educators are paid a fixed salary and don’t receive commissions or other sales incentives.
“It’s really nice to be able to be in a position where we can provide unbiased, objective advice and take on the role of an educator versus the prototypical salesman role that a lot of financial advisers take on,” Heitzman said.
Heitzman knows from first-hand experience. In his previous job at a boutique brokerage firm, Heitzman was under pressure to sell the firm’s financial products to retail financial professionals.
“I was basically faced with the prospect of ‘I’m either going to sell something or I don’t get a paycheck',” he recalled of his previous role.
Kelli Bennett and Jane Shouppe, AHRP financial educators who formerly worked for the Variable Annuity Life Insurance Co., a prior third-party vendor to AHRP, also reported greater satisfaction with their new role, saying they can now serve participants more equitably.
While VALIC expected financial advisers to serve all AHRP participants requesting help, it also encouraged the advisers to collect as many investment dollars from participants as possible and work with people with the most assets, they said.
Split focus
VALIC had what Bennett described as a “split focus.” It pushed its advisers to not just get everyone enrolled in the plan but to also gather assets from their individual retirement accounts and old 401(k) accounts and roll them over into VALIC IRAs, Bennett said.
Corebridge Financial, which now owns VALIC, declined to comment.
AHRP began building its team of financial educators in 2011, said Raymond Jimenez, AHRP’s president. “By having AHRP reps who themselves were employees and participants in the plan, there would be no questions as to objectivity, bringing reassurance to participants that they were receiving great unbiased education and recommendations with no sales pitches,” he said.
VALIC, for example, employed sales quotas to evaluate the performance of its advisers, including gross dealer concessions, a measure that gauged how much money they rolled over from IRAs and inactive workplace retirement accounts, according to Bennett.
The metric also weighed new contributions they set up through payroll deductions for 529 plans and Roth IRAs that VALIC offered.
Without having to worry about sales quotas, both Bennett and Shouppe now report being able to spend more time with participants needing help the most.
Doctors and other high-wage earners have different concerns from those of “frontline folks” who are cleaning the hospital rooms and checking people in when they arrive for pre-operative testing, Bennett said.
“I wanted to be just as much invested in the employees in the cafeteria and the employees in the landscaping department and the employees in our EVS or environmental services department,” she said, adding that her current role now allows her to “dig down and have deeper conversations with people.”
“Today I find that I’m able to have much more in-depth conversations that are more enriching for the employee, instead of just, ‘how much would you like to save? Sign here. We’ll see you next year so you can put more money in,’” Bennett said.
Shouppe also reported being able to help people who might not otherwise be given much time given the level of their wealth.
“I can spend an hour with someone in dietary and then 15 minutes with a physician because it’s based on need,” Shouppe said. “I don’t have to base my time on ‘How important is this client? What is the potential business? What is the asset level that they can bring in the door?’”
Very few employers use in-house financial advisers as AHRP does to provide financial guidance to participants in their workplace retirement savings plans.
The majority, 69%, provide financial guidance and counseling through their record keepers or other plan service providers, said Shannon Hanko, director of retirement at Willis Towers Watson, citing the firm’s 2024 defined contribution survey.
About 1 in 3 (35%) employers offer financial guidance through independent providers unrelated to their plans, such as Financial Finesse.
Hanko was not aware of any organizations offering in-house financial counseling and like other consultants interviewed for this story could not comment on why — and what type of — organizations opt for in-house advisers.
In-house financial advisers
Utah Retirement Systems is another employer that chose to build its own team of in-house team financial advisers.
The administrator of pension and retirement savings plans for some 210,000 public employees in Utah created the 15-person team to meet the needs of its participants, said Ryan Ashcraft, URS’ retirement planning director.
Ashcraft explained that URS participants had multiple benefits options, including a pension plan, a 401(k) plan and traditional and Roth IRAs, and the many choices overwhelmed them.
“They just wanted somebody to tell them what to do,” he said.
Ashcraft also said that some employees were frustrated with providers of 403(b) plans that persuaded them to get into products that were not in their best interest.
“This was something that we thought could really help our members make the right decisions by getting true objective advice,” he said.
URS launched the team in 2015 as part of its retirement planning program, which aimed to help employees understand their retirement plan options. The team’s role later expanded with the launch of a financial wellness program in 2020 to help employees with broader topics, such as budgeting and emergency savings.
For Russ Bulloch, a retirement planning adviser with URS, giving objective advice is what makes him tick.
He was previously a private adviser, working in roles that required him to sell products to earn a commission and make a living for his family.
“I like being able to advise people without feeling obligated to sell,” he said.
“In this role, I’m able to help people progress without that kind of inherent conflict of interest that I felt in roles with private financial firms where I had to meet certain quotas to keep my employment there,” he said. “I’m a good adviser. I’m not a very good salesman.”
