During Benefits Canada’s annual DC Plan Summit, plan sponsors participated in interactive sessions. They split into small groups and were given questions to discuss. Based on these discussions, moderators later offered their insights and relayed key take-aways.
Ken Millard, vice-president, national accounts, group retirement services with Great-West Life shares the best ideas from the topic they discussed.
The Challenge:
Statistics show that many plan members are unprepared for retirement. Even those who are putting away money are unclear on how much they’ll actually need. The problem: they don’t have a financial plan. What’s holding them back? Inertia, myopia (i.e., shortsightedness) and aversion to loss are common factors.
Survival Tips for Employers:
- Sponsors need to engage with providers to access tools for members. Depending on the plan, some of those tools may include automatic features such as auto-enrollment or auto-escalation.
- Sponsors can use more planning services, whether through employee assistance programs or other channels, to engage members.
- If sponsors aren’t ready to increase their engagement with members, they should at least push members to seek the service of a professional advisor.
Additional videos from the DC Plan Summit can be found here.