Administration March 13, 2025

How FinTech, AI Tools Can Improve Administration, Access to Financial Planning

Fintech leaders discussed how artificial intelligence and technology can provide investors with more access to financial planning and personalized advice.

Reported by

Developments in fintech and artificial intelligence continue to provide opportunities to ease the administrative burdens of plan sponsors, plan advisers and recordkeepers, as well as provide participants with more access to personalized investments and advice, according to fintech leaders speaking at Tuesday’s Employee Benefit Research Institute-Milken Institute 2025 Retirement Symposium.

Dan Beck, CEO and co-founder of 401Go, told attendees that one of the most exciting outcomes of using AI is helping retirement plans move past paper-based administration and leveraging technology to access plan data.

Get more!  Sign up for PLANSPONSOR newsletters.

“As I’ve talked with partners and potential clients, we go to some of these offices that have rooms of filing cabinets and paper-based systems,” Beck said. “I think a lot of the capabilities that we’re seeing with AI and personalized finance [is that] none of that works if we don’t have good data. … But I think there’s still a fairly big hurdle that we are currently in the state of trying to move everything to digital.”

401Go is a provider of 401(k) plans tailored for small enterprises and individuals. In September 2024, 401Go announced a partnership with Pontera to provide participants the ability to get personalized 401(k) account management from their financial adviser of choice.

Improving Financial Education

Sunil Gangwani, co-founder of Plootus, said many workers lack access to financial planning and advice, and their lack of investing knowledge is a major barrier to improvement. He argued that financial planning information needs to be readily available to employees on their mobile devices or computers, especially because people’s attention spans are so short.

Plootus is a platform that integrates an individual’s expenses, income and retirement plan investments all in one place. Plootus then provides personalized recommendations that aim to optimize investment performance, minimize fees and align with the employee’s retirement goals.

“You need to see the overall picture of the user, not necessarily just [their] 401(k) plan [savings],” Gangwani said.

With the stock market in turmoil, Gangwani said platform users have been asking for investment advice. While the platform encourages staying the course for long-term investing, Gangwani said Plootus is able to provide advice on how individuals should minimize their risk and make adjustments.

Increasing Personalization

Ana Mahony, founder and CEO of financial wellness platform Addition Wealth, argued that the technology and data available today enable a level of personalization that previously was unavailable. Such personalization can be used to provide certain types of workers, such as gig workers or medical practitoners, access to financial planning and retirement savings.

Mahony said gig workers often do not have access to a workplace retirement plan, but fintech companies can provide products suited to their specific needs. As an example, Mahony said providers could create a debit card that offers rewards for expenses that gig workers often incur, such as gas, car maintenance or different types of insurance. She said providers should be thinking about the type of support from which gig workers could benefit, as they often have inconsistent earnings and do not have the safety net of benefits that other workers have.

“You can actually build an entire ecosystem that helps educate people in [a] mobile app … and then also pull in different partners that have a vested interest in engaging with that group—and hopefully even have purchasing power—so that you can bring best-in-price models to that group of workers,” Mahony said.

Expanding Alts Options

Cash Lafferty, founder and CEO of PandoAlts, explained that technology and AI can also help investors gain more access to alternative investments. He said high-net-worth individuals and those who invest for pensions and endowments are probably about 50% allocated toward alternative investments and private markets, whereas the average investor is in a 60/40 stocks-and-bonds portfolio.

Lafferty argued that private-market access has been limited by legacy technology infrastructure, a limit he said needs to change.

“With AI, it really is just a tool to be able to extract information and put it into a place where we can start to consume these [alternative investments] into portfolios in a way that meets the needs of the investor,” Lafferty said.

He added that AI can also be trained to adhere to the guidelines of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which is important when plans are considering adding alternative investment options to their plan menu.

Lafferty’s PandoAlts connects wealth managers, general partners and broker/dealers on one platform to simplify alternative investing.

Benefits March 13, 2025

Georgia Considering Bill to Create a State-Run Retirement Plan

The proposed Peach State Saves program would require employers to automatically enroll eligible workers in a Roth IRA.

Reported by

Georgia lawmakers have proposed a bill that would establish Peach State Saves, a defined contribution retirement program for most private sector employees without access to employer-sponsored plans. 

Under the bill, a covered employer that does not offer a retirement plan would be required to automatically enroll employees in a payroll-deduction individual retirement account run by the state, unless an employee chooses to opt out of the program.   

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANSPONSOR NEWSDash daily newsletter.

A covered employer is defined in the bill as “any person, partnership, limited liability company, corporation, or other entity engaged in a business, industry, profession, trade, or other enterprise in the state, including a nonprofit entity” that has been in business for at least a year and has at least five covered employees. A covered employee refers to someone who is at least 18 years old, is employed by a covered employer, and whose wages or other compensation is taxable by the state.

Employees would be enrolled in a Roth IRA at an automatic contribution rate of 5% of wages. The program would also allow for voluntary contributions by self-employed workers and independent contractors through payroll deduction.

The bill stipulates that if a participant in the plan is no longer a covered employee, they will still continue to accrue earnings and that a participant’s account balance will always be 100% vested and nonforfeitable.

The American Association of Retired Persons’ Georgia chapter is urging the state legislature to pass the bill. According to AARP Georgia, there are nearly 1.7 million private-sector employees in the state with annual earnings of $50,000 or less who lack access to an employer-provided retirement plan, and another 375,000 employees earning more than $50,000 per year also do not have access to a workplace plan. 

According to AARP Georgia, Americans are 15 times more likely to save for retirement if they have the option to do so at work and 20 times more likely to save if they are automatically enrolled in a workplace savings option.

“The Georgia Peach State Saves Plan provides a way for Georgians to save on the job while reducing their reliance on taxpayer-funded programs later in life,” AARP Georgia stated, citing an AARP study that estimated the U.S. could save $33 billion between 2018 and 2032 through retirement savings and increased retirement income. It also stated that doing nothing will increase state government costs by more than $8 billion over the next 19 years.

Nineteen states offer some kind of state-facilitated retirement savings program, according to data collected by the Georgetown University Center for Retirement Initiatives. Through February 2024, the state programs have collected a total of $1.9 billion in retirement assets, the center reported.

«