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Plan sponsors and retirement plan advisers have a new tool to analyze 401(k) plans.
Benchmine Analytics is a comparative analytics engine that uses artificial intelligence to extract information from Department of Labor Form 5500, to provide the user with plan performance insights, explained creator and CEO of OnlyBoth, Inc., Raul Valdes-Perez. With the tool plan sponsors and retirement plan advisers can assess, compare, and score 401(k) plans through a digestible, easy to understand interface.
“For plan sponsors it is a way to understand their plans performance on different levels as well as understand performance against others within your industry,” said Valdes-Perez. “We hope to bring transparency and thereby drive improvements to the 401(k) sector by making this free and open.”
The tool draws from a storehouse of just-released 2021 Department of Labor data which includes data for every DC plan with $1 million or more in assets, that filed a Form 5500 Schedule H.
While anybody with an internet connection can download the Department of Labor Form 5500 and the Schedule H data, “making sense of it is a whole different aspect,” said Valdez-Perez.
The current database includes 54,495 401(k) plans with $6.6 trillion in total assets, according to the website Benchmine.com.
“That’s the subset that we’re analyzing, [now but] we could do 403(b)s in the future,” said Valdes-Perez.
The analytics tool was initially made available for use of members of the Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association, Plan Sponsor Institute and partner organizations. The partnership with DCIIA and PSI ended with the release of 2021 plan sponsor Schedule H and Form 5500 data, by the Department of Labor.
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