Surveying Employer 401(k) Plan Attitudes & Decisions

Employers consistently want to know what other employers are doing in their 401(k) plan. In this episode we drill into the decisions employers are making about plan design, investment options, fiduciary process and employee retirement outcomes. The heavy lifting is done by Derek Wallen, a SVP at Fidelity and architect of their annual Plan Sponsor Attitudes Survey.  Derek does a nice job highlighting the key finds of this years survey which is hot off the presses and comparing result to prior years.  He also does all of this in a way that is easy to understand and compare contrast what is going on in your plan.  If you would like a copy of the survey go to 401kfridays.com/wallen and we will have a link. Or, if you are an email subscriber we will send that out to you. If you are not an email suscriber, go to 401kfrisays.com/subscribe today to get that taken care of.   Finally, we are going to take a little summer hiatus so this will be the last new episode for a few weeks. Don't forget we have over 120 episodes in the archives you can explore and we will repost a few prior episodes while we are on break.  When we come back with new episodes we will also have a fancy new website and a few other surprises to be sure to check it out! Guest Bio Derek Wallen is senior vice president and head of Defined Contribution Investment Only (DCIO) Sales at Fidelity Institutional Asset ManagementSM (FIAMSM), Fidelity Investments' distribution and client service organizationdedicated to meeting the needs of consultants and institutional investors, such as defined benefit and defined contribution plans, endowments, and financial advisors. In this role, Mr. Wallen oversees the DCIO team distributing Fidelity Investment asset management capabilities through advisors, advisory firms, and record keepers focused on serving the small and mid-sized defined contribution marketplace. Prior to assuming his current position in 2011, Mr. Wallen managed institutional insurance sales for the eastern region of the United States. He joined Fidelity in 1991 as a sales executive responsible for the Chicago, New York, and Boston marketplaces. Mr. Wallen graduated from Villanova University. He has also completed the Leadership Development Program at the Center for Creative Leadership and the Securities Industry Institute. 401(k) Fridays Podcast Overview Struggling with a fiduciary issue, looking for strategies to improve employee retirement outcomes or curious about the impact of current events on your retirement plan? We've had conversations with retirement industry leaders to address these and other relevant topics! You can easily explore over one hundred prior on-demand audio interviews here. Don't forget to subscribe as we release a new episode each Friday!