PLAN DESIGN

We believe retirement plans are one of the best ways for employers to build employee loyalty and retention, and for employees to save towards a comfortable retirement lifestyle. As a member of the Retirement Plan Advisory Group™, we use the Scorecard? System to enhance investment opportunities to ensure your plan design is consistent with your company philosophy.

The Scorecard? System methodology incorporates both quantitative and qualitative factors in evaluating fund managers and their investment strategies.

The scoring system is built around pass/fail criteria, on a scale of 0 to 10, ranking active, passive, and asset allocation strategies. Eighty percent of the fund’s score is quantitative, incorporating modern portfolio theory statistics, quadratic optimization analysis, and peer group rankings. The other 20% of the score is qualitative, taking into account manager tenure, the fund’s expense ratio relative to the average fund expense ratio in that asset class category, and the fund’s strength of statistics, among other criteria.

Combined, these factors are a way of measuring the relative performance, characteristics, behavior and overall appropriateness of a fund for inclusion into a plan as an investment option.

RPAG’s Scorecard? System and Investment Due Diligence process is unique in that it uses a complete approach that not only takes into account risk adjusted return characteristics, but style, peer group rankings and various qualitative factors. This process is very similar to what the largest and most advanced investment institutions in the world utilize to select and monitor their investments, yet has been simplified for any sized plan.

• RPAG’s CFA®-led investment research team monitors the entire mutual fund universe, and uses MPI Stylus® for its portfolio analytics.
  The Scorecard? System ranks more than 20,000 funds across 36 asset classes and 65 vendor products, including Open Architecture.
  
• RPAG routinely meets with investment managers at their home offices as well as our Orange County headquarters, to facilitate the qualitative analysis of the due diligence process. This information is disseminated to RPAG advisors via quarterly webinars and conference calls.
  
• The due diligence process includes Investment Policy Statement creation and review; quarterly Market Summaries; and transition assistance when terminating/hiring a fund manager.
  
• Through affiliation, we can offer our clients access to RPAG’s secure online Fiduciary Briefcase™, which allows committee members to access investment reports 24/7.

Independence Financial Partners is a member of Retirement Plan Advisory Group™ (RPAG™). The consulting services reflect services that we will provide as a result of our member with RPAG. This includes, but is not limited to, investment due diligence, RFP and fee benchmarking, plan design and fiduciary review and communication services.