Deals and People December 17, 2021

Retirement Industry People Moves

Hub International makes new acquisition; Carillon Tower Advisers names head of sustainable investing and corporate responsibility; K&L Gates adds employee benefits partner; and more.

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Art by Subin Yang
Art by Subin Yang
Art by Subin Yang

Hub International Boosts Retirement Capabilities With New Acquisition

Hub International Limited, a global insurance brokerage and financial services firm, has announced that it has acquired the assets of Fiducia Group. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Based in Pittsburgh, Fiducia Group provides 401(k) and retirement plan consulting services to the corporate, Taft-Hartley, public and nonprofit sectors. The firm helps employers navigate the complexities of workplace retirement plans with fiduciary support and investment advisory services and seeks to improve outcomes for retirement plan participants. Fiducia Group manages more than $2.3 billion in assets.

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Managing Principal Charley Kennedy; James Bartoszewicz, chief compliance officer and principal; and the Fiducia Group team will join the team in Pittsburgh.

Hub Retirement and Private Wealth works to help plan sponsors create an offering that aligns with their business strategy, navigate fiduciary risk and help employees pursue their financial goals. The several registered investment advisory affiliates in Hub Retirement and Private Wealth provide investment advisory services to clients whose total assets are approximately $105 billion.

Carillon Tower Advisers Names Head of Sustainable Investing and Corporate Responsibility

Carillon Tower Advisers, a multi-boutique asset management firm, announced that it has promoted Joy Facos to head of sustainable investing and corporate responsibility. In this role, Facos will oversee the firm’s ongoing efforts to integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles and corporate engagement to meet the needs of clients. In addition, she will lead the firm’s stewardship committee and ESG data working group.

In this expanded leadership position, Facos will continue building ESG, proxy voting and corporate engagement best practices across Carillon’s equity and fixed-income investment strategies. Additionally, she will co-lead Carillon’s newly created diversity and inclusion committee with Helaine Huntley, head of marketing services, in conjunction with broader corporate responsibility initiatives at Raymond James, Carillon’s parent company.

“Our approach to corporate engagement with the companies in which we invest is demonstrably leading to changes for the better. Being an active participatory investor is critical to influencing the positive outcomes both we and our clients want to see,” Facos says. “In addition, I’m proud to support our key inclusion objectives centered on workforce, workplace and community, which contribute to better outcomes for our firm and our clients.”

Facos first joined Carillon in August 2020 as head of responsible investing after a decade of experience advising asset managers on how to incorporate ESG considerations into their investment processes. Most recently, she was a principal at ESG Research Associates, and before that, she was a sustainable investing research analyst at Sentinel Investments. Facos also previously served as head of risk management and head of credit research at Dwight Asset Management.

K&L Gates Adds Employee Benefits Partner

Global law firm K&L Gates LLP has welcomed Victor Chang as a partner in the benefits, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and executive compensation practice area. He joins K&L Gates’ Washington, D.C., office, arriving from Jones Day.

An ERISA [Employee Retirement Income Security Act] and tax lawyer, Chang has more than 15 years of experience counseling employers on complex employee benefits matters and representing tax-exempt organizations on regulatory, transactional and governance issues.

Chang advises both for-profit and nonprofit/governmental employers on a wide range of benefits and compensation matters, including welfare and retirement plan design, implementing voluntary compliance program corrections, resolving IRS and Department of Labor (DOL) audits, counseling plan committees on fiduciary matters, managing payroll and employment tax issues, and handling a variety of benefits issues that arise in corporate acquisitions, dispositions and restructurings.

Chang’s tax-exempt organizations practice focuses on private charitable foundations. He has provided tax and legal advice to several the country’s largest private family foundations as well as the corporate foundations of several Fortune 500 companies.

Mercer Appoints New Central Market Wealth Business Leader

Mercer has named Sylvia Diez as central market business leader, wealth. Based in Pittsburgh, her responsibilities include building brand and market awareness, driving revenue growth and providing strategic direction in Mercer’s wealth business across the firm’s central U.S. market. She will report to Greg Martens, senior partner and central market CEO.

Diez brings more than 20 years of institutional investment and retirement plan experience to Mercer. Most recently, she was an executive vice president and regional managing director at PNC, where she led the firm’s institutional asset management group in the Midwest and Western United States. She served as co-chair of the business segment’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) leadership council and was the executive sponsor of collaboration with the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute. Prior to that, she spent 10 years at Citi, starting as account relationship manager and moving to regional manager in the Southern California and Pittsburgh offices.

Diez earned her bachelor’s degree from Robert Morris University.

AIG Hires Global Head of Strategy and ESG

American International Group (AIG) has announced that Constance Hunter will join the company as executive vice president, global head of strategy and ESG in early 2022. Hunter will report to Peter Zaffino, president and CEO, and will join AIG’s executive leadership team.

Hunter joins AIG from KPMG, where she has served as chief economist since 2013 and as a member of the growth and strategy leadership team since 2020. Prior to that, she served as deputy chief investment officer (CIO) at AXA Investment Managers, where she helped lead the management of more than $500 billion in fixed-income assets.

Hunter is an expert in macroeconomic and industry analysis and is recognized for being among the first economists to forecast pivotal economic events, including the impacts of COVID-19 on U.S. and other global economies, the 2007 real estate and credit crisis, and the 2001 burst of the dot-com bubble. She holds a bachelor’s in economics and sociology from New York University, a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and the Certified Business Economist designation.

Vontobel to Acquire New Business Serving U.S. Clients

Vontobel, an investment firm, has announced it signed an agreement to purchase UBS Swiss Financial Advisers AG (SFA), a subsidiary of UBS AG, based in Zurich, Switzerland. With this acquisition, Vontobel seeks to further strengthen its platform providing clients with a global investment approach and geographic diversification. Vontobel, through Vontobel Swiss Wealth Advisors (VSWA), is one of the leading Swiss-domiciled providers of wealth management investment solutions for U.S. and qualified Canadian investors.

Vontobel will combine SFA and VSWA, its existing business serving North American wealth management clients. Preparations for this will start after the closing of the transaction, which is expected to come in the third quarter of 2022.

Following the transaction, UBS will continue to refer its clients to SFA, a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)-registered investment adviser (RIA) and FINMA [Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority]-licensed securities firm, which offers U.S. clients tailored investment solutions in a Swiss-based environment.

The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approvals, will be fully funded with cash from Vontobel’s balance sheet, covered by its robust CET1 and Tier 1 capital ratios. Additional financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

HBL Makes Orange County, California, Hire

Boutique Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) law firm Hall Benefits Law has welcomed Phil Koehler, lead ERISA counsel, to its legal team. Koehler brings to the firm a juris doctor’s degree from the University of Southern California and a master’s of business administration, along with 30 years of tax and employee benefit plans legal experience.

The firm says Koehler’s addition gives HBL the advantage of having a physical presence on the West Coast, specifically in Southern California, where demand is especially high for quality ERISA legal compliance counsel.

In addition to his years of experience as an ERISA attorney, Koehler has both accounting firm and teaching experience. Beyond teaching law students, Koehler has also designed and conducted training programs for third-party administrator (TPA) staff and external programs for plan sponsors.

Data and Research December 17, 2021

‘Historically Tight’ Labor Market Stresses Employers

Job openings are at record highs, fast food and retail outfits are offering hiring bonuses, and large corporations from retail to banking have substantially raised their minimum wages.

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Wilmington Trust has published a report of its annual capital markets assumptions, this year putting a spotlight on several macroeconomic trends that have been either caused by or significantly accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Among these themes is the emergence of a historically tight labor market—wherein the number of job openings far outpaces the number of available workers. According to Wilmington Trust’s market experts, this trend is “badly out of sync with the overall economic cycle,” which in other ways appears very promising. As the report spells out, this severe labor market shortage, more than any other economic factor, is accounting for a massive breakdown in the normally well-oiled global supply chain.

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Consumers and economists alike can see disruptions at every node of the supply chain, from production to transportation and distribution, and these are straining businesses globally. A more subtle factor at play, the report suggests, is the way labor participation—and how firms deal with global resource disorder—will likely determine the path for inflation, which is “the critical consideration” for investors, employers and economies as a whole in 2022.

“By nearly any measure, the U.S. labor market is sending the customary signals of an economy deep in the deceleration phase,” the report explains. “Job openings are at record highs, fast food and retail outfits are offering hiring bonuses, and large corporations from retail to banking have substantially raised their minimum wages. These clear signs of labor market tightness are perhaps counterintuitive given the relative youth of the economic recovery—not yet two years young—coupled with the monumental scale of job losses during the pandemic.”

Wilmington Trust’s analysis concludes there are multiple forces impeding the return of workers and, to varying degrees, the firm expects these forces to abate in 2022 and conditions to ease. In its analysts’ view, the main drivers holding back labor force participation are accelerated retirements, broad skills mismatches, workers making serious and potentially durable lifestyle reassessments, and the lingering effects of the pandemic.

As the report explains, the labor market in an economy that is emerging from a recession or depression typically lags the economic and market recovery.

“For example, in the previous cycle, the economy bottomed out in June 2009, but the labor market kept worsening for more than six months,” the report notes. “Job losses continued until March 2010 and the unemployment rate did not decline significantly until the summer, a full year after the recession ended. [Likewise,] the unemployment rate peaks for the 1990 and 2001 recession periods came long after the recessions had ended.”

Wilmington Trust calls this “a familiar and reliable dynamic,” as employers are reticent to hire until the recovery is well-established. As such, in a “normal cycle,” it takes years for the unemployment rate to grind lower and for wage pressures to build.

It does not take a skilled economist to recognize that this cycle is different. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2% as of November, and there are reasons to believe the official unemployment rate is even understating the degree of tightness in the labor market, due to low participation. These factors imply that, not only has the labor market never been this tight, but never before has a tight labor market happened this quickly after a downturn. In hard numbers, government data shows the overall labor force is down by 2.4 million workers as of November, and much of the decline, especially for the upper age brackets, is likely permanent, according to Wilmington Trust.

“The long-anticipated retirement of Baby Boomers is a structural phenomenon, but it has been hastened by cyclical forces, including financial markets,” the report suggests. “Ironically, the rapid recovery of equity markets (and, by extension, retirement accounts) worked hand-in-hand with COVID fatigue to quicken the retirement of the largest U.S. generation. … Once financial markets recovered, retirement accelerated.”

This dynamic has created a vacuum, the report explains, and many employers are seeing mid-level employees either moving up quickly or being hired away by competitors. The vacuum is also horizontal across sectors, the report finds, with former restaurant staffers, for example, being scooped up to work in other industries, creating novel challenges for refilling positions.

“We expect markets and retirement accounts to perform well in 2022, so we do not anticipate that recent retirees will rush back in,” the report says. “But a host of factors could entice some to return, including a period of market weakness, higher wages or a realization that retirement funds will prove insufficient.”

Ultimately, with the demand for talent so far outstripping supply, and a third of U.S. workers considering a job change in the next year, employers are being forced to pay more attention than ever to their workers’ expectations and desires, as well as their emotional and physical well-being in the workplace. Together, these trends are redefining the workplace benefits market.

The full text of the Wilmington Trust report is available here.

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