Prudent process.
Documented decisions.
STRIVE partners with plan sponsors to benchmark plan costs, build the governance record behind investment decisions, and turn your retirement plan into a benefit employees actually engage with. Serving employers nationwide for nearly two decades. Corporate retirement plans are a core part of our business, not a sideline.
Sponsoring a retirement plan makes you a fiduciary.
Under ERISA, plan fiduciaries are responsible for the fees employees pay and the decisions made on their behalf. Individuals may be named personally, and most take that on without the support to manage it well.
Oversight expectations for plan sponsors have moved. Not every item below applies to every plan, but each is an area sponsors are increasingly asked to show they have considered and documented.
- 01Fee litigation reached mid-size plansExcessive-fee claims once aimed at the largest plans have been filed against plans a fraction of that size. What tends to be examined is the process: how fees were reviewed, what they were compared against, and why they were judged reasonable.
- 02Benchmarking, not just disclosureA fee disclosure shows what a plan pays, not whether it is competitive. Sponsors are generally expected to evaluate plan costs against comparable arrangements periodically, and to retain the analysis.
- 03SECURE 2.0 provisions phasing inAuto-enrollment requirements for many newer plans, changes to catch-up contributions, and long-term part-time eligibility each require the plan document, payroll, and recordkeeper to stay aligned.
- 04Cybersecurity oversightDepartment of Labor guidance asks sponsors to evaluate the security practices of the providers holding participant data and assets, and to document that the review actually took place.
- 05Missing participants & uncashed checksAn ongoing examination focus. Written procedures for locating former participants and handling uncashed distribution checks are increasingly expected, particularly as a plan grows.
- 06Process is what gets evaluatedFiduciary decisions are generally judged on the process behind them rather than on investment results. Minutes, policy review, and monitoring records are what make that process visible later.
This section is a general summary for discussion and is not legal advice. Regulatory requirements and litigation trends change; how any of them applies to your plan should be reviewed with qualified ERISA counsel.
Your providers each own a slice. Someone has to look at the whole.
The questions that cut across every provider are the ones that often go unasked: what the plan really costs, how it compares to the market today, and whether the fiduciary process is documented well enough to stand up to review. That is where we specialize.
Fiduciary Consulting
Manage and document your fiduciary responsibilities with a defensible, repeatable governance process.
- Fiduciary role in writing (3(21) or 3(38))
- Investment Policy Statement template
- Committee materials & meeting templates
- Compliance & review calendar
Fee Benchmarking
Find out what your plan really costs, and whether those costs are reasonable for what it delivers.
- All-in fee analysis
- Recordkeeper benchmarking
- Provider RFPs & proposal analysis
- Annual fee reasonableness review
Employee Education
Turn enrollment into engagement with guidance employees actually act on.
- Group & 1:1 enrollment sessions
- Virtual sessions, on-site where available
- Participation & deferral tracking
- Retirement-readiness reporting
Financial Wellness Program
Group education for your employees, with topics from budgeting basics and debt management to estate planning basics.
- A fourteen-topic session menu
- Debt Management & Reduction Strategies
- Financial Goal Setting
- Individual participant appointments
Plan Design Review
Review the design levers with you and your providers, so the plan fits your workforce and your goals.
- Safe Harbor & profit-sharing structures
- Auto-enrollment & escalation
- Match structure review
- Participant eligibility criteria
Ongoing Oversight
Your plan isn't set-and-forget. We monitor, report, and keep the process moving.
- Quarterly investment review
- Provider performance monitoring
- Regulatory change updates
- Dedicated point of contact
Your providers
The recordkeeper maintains accounts and processes transactions. The third-party administrator handles testing, documents, and filings. Payroll transmits contributions. Fund companies manage the portfolios in your lineup. Each is accountable for its own scope of work, and none of them is positioned to evaluate the others.
STRIVE
We represent the employer as the plan's advisor and serve as a fiduciary to the plan in an ERISA 3(21) or 3(38) capacity, as defined in the written service agreement. Under a 3(38) appointment, that role includes acting as the plan's investment manager, so advice and investment discretion stay with one firm rather than splitting across two. We help management understand what the plan is paying for, whether providers are performing appropriately, whether fees remain competitive, and whether the overall arrangement continues to serve the company and its employees. Your providers stay in place under their own agreements with the plan. What changes is that we coordinate across them and become your first call on plan-level issues.
What your plan pays versus what the market is offering.
Your plan's fee disclosures tell you what you pay. They do not show whether it is competitive. Our service-provider fee comparison assembles the all-in cost of your current arrangement and sets it next to competing proposals on identical assumptions.
All-in, not just the visible layer
Recordkeeping, custodial, third-party administration, advisory, and audit fees, plus the weighted expense of the investment lineup, combined into one number in dollars and in basis points.
Apples to apples
Up to three provider proposals modeled against your current plan on the same asset and participant assumptions, so a lower headline rate does not hide a higher total.
A record you keep
The completed analysis is retained in your fiduciary file, documenting that fees were reviewed, what they were compared against, and when.
A $12,000,000 plan with 180 participants. Figures are illustrative and do not represent any actual plan.
| Cost component | Current plan | Proposal A | Proposal B |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recordkeeping | $18,000 | $14,400 | $21,600 |
| Custodial | $3,600 | $3,000 | $3,600 |
| Third-party administrator | $6,000 | $6,500 | $7,200 |
| Investment advisor | $30,000 | $30,000 | $30,000 |
| Audit | $9,000 | $9,000 | $9,500 |
| Total annual service fees | $66,60055.5 bps | $62,90052.4 bps | $71,90059.9 bps |
| Weighted investment expense | $50,4000.42% | $43,2000.36% | $46,8000.39% |
| Estimated all-in annual cost | $117,00097.5 bps | $106,10088.4 bps | $118,70098.9 bps |
A comparison does not presume a change. In this example one proposal comes in below the current arrangement and one above it. Benchmarking sometimes confirms that what a plan pays is already competitive, and that conclusion is worth documenting too.
ERISA-covered plans receive plan-level fee disclosures under 408(b)(2) and participant disclosures under 404(a)(5). Many non-ERISA arrangements, including SIMPLE IRAs and most governmental 403(b) and 457(b) plans, do not, which makes an independent comparison the only view of total cost. The comparison is produced using STRIVE's service-provider fee comparison tool, and access is provided to plan sponsors during an engagement. The example above is hypothetical, is provided for illustration only, and is not a projection or assurance of cost savings, investment performance, or compliance outcomes. Actual results depend on your plan's assets, participant count, investment lineup, and provider agreements.
You generally don't need to move your plan to work with us.
Many employers assume that engaging a new advisor means converting the plan, changing recordkeepers, re-enrolling employees, and absorbing months of disruption. In many situations, it does not.
STRIVE works with most recordkeepers, TPAs, and custodians, including firms such as Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Empower. In many cases a company can retain its platform and avoid a conversion, re-enrollment, and months of disruption, appointing STRIVE as advisor without moving the plan. From there we can evaluate the plan as it stands, identify opportunities for improvement, strengthen the fiduciary process, and work with your current providers on your behalf.
Required is the word that matters. Our role is to evaluate the plan as it stands, not to move it. If the review shows that a change would serve the plan and its participants better, we will make that case in writing, and the decision remains yours as the plan sponsor.
Whether this is available for your plan depends on your plan documents, platform, and provider agreements, and should be reviewed on a plan-by-plan basis.
Recordkeeper, custodian, and other service-provider names are used for identification purposes only and do not imply affiliation, endorsement, or a recommendation. Whether STRIVE can serve a plan alongside its existing providers depends on the plan's documents, platform, and provider agreements, and should be reviewed on a plan-by-plan basis.
A clear, documented process that is repeatable and scheduled.
Each stage has a defined scope, a set cadence, and a deliverable that goes into your fiduciary file.
Discover
Understand the plan
- Plan documents & design
- Committee & fiduciary roles
- Goals for the plan
Benchmark
Fees and investments
- Service-provider fees
- Investment lineup
- Peer comparison
Structure
Build the framework
- Committee charter template
- Investment Policy Statement template
- Fiduciary appointment templates
Monitor
Review and document
- Quarterly investment monitoring
- Committee meeting materials
- Documented recommendations
Educate
Support your employees
- Enrollment meetings
- Financial Wellness topics
- Participant resources
Report
Review and adjust
- Annual plan review
- Provider performance
- Next-year priorities
- A current fee and investment benchmarking summary
- Meeting materials prepared for the committee
- An Investment Policy Statement template, for adoption by the sponsor and its counsel
- A written plan review for leadership
- Documented investment monitoring against that policy
- A participant education schedule for the year ahead
Deliverables, frequency, and format are set out in the written service agreement and vary by engagement and plan size.
Your employees get a person, not a portal.
A retirement plan only works if people use it. We don't hand your team a login and walk away. We run group enrollment meetings, meet with employees individually, and answer the real questions they have about saving, debt, and their future.
Employees who understand the plan are better positioned to use it, which supports the outcome you adopted it to achieve.
Wealth management for the people behind the plan.
The discipline we bring to corporate plans extends to the people inside them. For individuals and families, STRIVE builds advice around protecting and growing what you've earned, with advisory services held to a fiduciary standard.
Insurance products are not advisory services. Individual advisory relationships are established under a separate written agreement; see our disclosure documents below.
Talk to an advisorThree steps, and you can stop after any of them.
Before changing anything, see where the plan actually stands. The Plan Diagnostic is a written review you keep, whether or not you engage us.
A conversation
Thirty minutes on your plan, your providers, and what leadership wants from the benefit. No document request, no cost, and no obligation.
The Plan Diagnostic
The standard first step. One consolidated document request, then written findings, a fee benchmark, and a gap list you keep. The Diagnostic carries a fixed fee, stated in writing before you commit, invoiced to the company rather than paid from plan assets. If you go on to a consulting engagement, that fee is applied toward it.
Your decision
A short meeting to walk through what we found. If a consulting engagement makes sense, we propose a scope. There is no obligation to proceed.
Every engagement is subject to a written agreement governing scope, fees, payment terms, and term. Retaining an investment fiduciary may help a plan sponsor manage its fiduciary responsibilities but generally does not eliminate them. This material is educational and is not individualized investment, tax, or legal advice, and contains no projection or assurance of investment performance, cost savings, or compliance outcomes.
Independent. Fiduciary. Specialist.
We are not owned by a fund company or a recordkeeper, and no product platform decides what we recommend. Our fiduciary role is acknowledged in writing in the service agreement that governs the engagement, and it obligates us to act in your best interest. Corporate retirement plans are the core of our business: they are the work we do every week, from plan design and investment monitoring to fiduciary governance and employee education.
Start a conversationStart with a conversation.
Tell us a little about your plan or your goals. We'll follow up to schedule a conversation — no pressure, no sales script.