RESEARCH |
2019
DC Survey: Plan Benchmarking
Data Sweep: Our latest findings on DC plans—for benchmarking a plan against its peers or just gleaning some new solutions
Reported by PLANSPONSOR
| Art by Daniel Shaffer
2019 Survey
Automatic Features
Automatic enrollment is frequently cited as a way to improve participant outcomes, yet such automatic features remain underutilized by smaller plans, where their adoption is only one-third that at larger plans. Overall, participation rates can increase by 10% to 15% with auto-enrollment, but only one in four micro plans have implemented it. When they do auto-enroll, sponsors overwhelmingly prefer target-date funds (TDFs) as the default investment. Use of auto-escalation somewhat mirrors that of auto-enrollment, though many sponsors choose to offer it on an opt-in, vs. opt-out, basis.
