Interlake's goal is to deliver retirement plans that set their sponsors apart from the crowd and foster enthusiastic participation among their participants. If you want a great 401(k) program that delights your current employees and impresses prospective ones, you've come to the right place.
Download "Four Pillars of 401(k) Excellence"Interlake helps retirement plan sponsors in four important areas: (1) optimizing plan design; (2) managing plan investments; (3) advising participants; and (4) ensuring compliance and operational excellence. In each of these functions, we work hard to minimize total expenses, maximize participant confidence, and deliver great outcomes for all parties.
To simplify plan sponsorship for employers, Interlake assumes the role of Investment Manager under Section 3(38) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). This is the gold standard of fiduciary delegation, reducing sponsors’ legal liability and practical workload while easing ERISA compliance.
If you'd like to get started with a 10-minute fiduciary wellness assessment using Interlake's diagnostic questionnaire, just click here and you'll be on your way. (These are simple Yes/No/Unsure questions that don't require you to dig through your files for data or documents.)
Once we review your results, we'll follow up with a detailed report and any suggestions we might have for taking your workplace retirement plan to a new level of fiduciary excellence.
The first step in creating a successful 401(k) program is getting plan design just right for the sponsor. What are your goals in offering a defined-contribution plan? How does it fit in your larger benefits package? How can we tailor it to fit the specific needs of your workforce?
These big-picture questions lead to decisions on eligibility, matching, vesting, and profit-sharing; the use of automatic elements such as enrollment and escalation; and the addition of cash balance or non-qualified plans to help owners, executives, and highly compensated employees save and invest more for the future.
With plan design dialed in, we move on to the construction of your investment program. ERISA imposes—and Interlake embraces—a very high standard of care in the management of investment options for retirement plans. In selecting funds and building a complete set of professionally managed solutions, we put fiduciary prudence at the center of our work. Our goal here is simple: to give participants easy access to high-quality, low-cost investments that offer them the best possible chance of long-term success.
Interlake’s cost-efficient investment program features a cutting-edge mix of index funds, best-in-class active managers, and factor-based funds, all for 0.20% to 0.40% annually, well below industry averages.
As a truly independent firm, Interlake has no product-driven conflicts of interest in the selection of funds or the delivery of advice to plan participants. We do not sell investment products to anyone. Instead, we sit with our clients on the same side of the table to help them choose among thoughtfully crafted investment options. To set our advisory services (and your plan) apart from the crowd, Interlake makes both Elements and Tolerisk available to all plan participants at no cost.
To help our sponsor-clients deliver great retirement plans, Interlake partners with a select group of firms—recordkeepers, third-party administrators, trust companies, and auditors—who share our commitments to precision, helpful service, and reasonable fees. In addition to the advantages of working with top service providers in each area, this structure makes Department of Labor-mandated benchmarking and fee disclosure simple and transparent.
Interlake also subscribes to Fi360’s Fiduciary Toolkit and Fiduciary Works' Perseptiv, which streamline quarterly reporting and facilitate the ongoing due diligence ERISA requires of sponsors and service providers.
Some dimensions of plan operations are timeless: regulatory compliance, fair and reasonable expenses, investment diversification, and investor discipline, to name a few. In addition to those evergreen requirements, Interlake is working on the leading edge of three important developments in the 401(k) world: the personalization of participant investments through managed accounts, the protection of participant assets through lifetime income options, and the delivery of financial wellness tools to participants through scalable technology.
Technology has made personalization a routine part of our lives in many areas. In the realm of retirement plan investments, we see a continuum from least to most personalization. Please click on each category below to learn more about these options and how they can fit into your plan's investment menu.
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Over the last few decades, legal and economic forces have elevated defined-contribution programs, such as the 401(k) plan, over defined-benefit programs, such as traditional pension plans that delivered paychecks for life to retirees. The practical effect of this change has been to shift several types of risk from employers and their pension funds to individual saver-investors and their retirement accounts. These factors loom large: longevity risk, sequence-of-returns risk, inflation risk, and general market risk.
Because of the uncertainty caused by those risks, even the most committed retirement savers struggle to become confident retirement spenders. Thanks to recent legal developments, primarily the SECURE Acts of 2019 and 2022, major players in the retirement industry—insurance companies, asset managers, recordkeepers, and advisory firms such as Interlake—are beginning to introduce in-plan lifetime income options that offer cash flow guarantees along with the potential for growth. These aren't traditional annuities with their bloated expenses and paralyzing illiquidty. These are modern, flexible options designed to address the most basic financial question any of us can ask: Will I have enough?
When positioned alongside Social Security, these guaranteed income options can boost participant confidence, facilitate more accurate financial planning, and improve quality of life during retirement by giving people permission to spend without fearing that they might run out of money. The array of risks that once shifted to individual plan participants (with their unknown but discrete time horizons) can now move to insurers (with their effectively infinite time horizons). That's a big and welcome change. Interlake encourages plan sponsors to learn more about this emerging financial technology.
Working with our partners at Nestimate, Interlake is currently developing a fiduciary process for the selection and monitoring of lifetime income products. Soon, we'll be able to give new meaning to the income security part of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
To assist all participants in our workplace retirement plans, Interlake offers access to two outstanding financial wellness tools, Elements and Tolerisk.
Elements is a beautifully designed app-based system that can help your participants gain clear, consolidated views of their financial lives. Using information and insight from Elements, we can help them track their financial vital signs and identify the next, best steps they can take toward their long-term goals.
Tolerisk is a powerful two-dimensional risk-alignment system. To produce their Tolerisk Scores, participants can answer a few questions about their psychological willingness to accept risk, then provide information about their financial capacity to absorb risk. From there, Tolerisk will deliver a personalized report participants can use to make investment elections and as a foundation for long-term confidence and commitment no matter what the capital markets do in the short run.
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