Most institutional investors are grappling with the reality of lower expected returns even as their spending needs increase. The way forward can be clouded by changeable markets, a proliferation of complex alternative financial instruments and the constant presence of risk.

FiduciaryVest works with trustee-directed institutions to address these challenges. By gaining a clear understanding of your goals, we serve you best as an independent extension of your internal team, providing an added layer of fiduciary protection, focused thinking and seasoned investment management capabilities that are:

Knowledgeable

Our strong research and investment experience help institutions navigate the uncertain waters of investing. Our advisors, with deep education and professional training in investments and economics, bring innovative ideas that align with an organization’s stated mission and its investment program.

Sophisticated clients want access to elite alternative investments. We take pride in being able to keep things simple, to explain the benefits and risks of these investments in everyday language. We constantly challenge ourselves to “see around corners,” to identify areas of opportunity that our clients may not have previously considered.

Our approach to building policies, selecting investments and asset allocation strategies helps to fill gaps in an organization that may lack the inclination, expertise, time or confidence to make investment decisions.

Our technical skills and process-driven approach includes creating and implementing well-documented protocols for sound governance, investment monitoring, and plan document review.

We are firmly convinced that investment design plays an outsized role in giving your employees greater confidence in pursing their financial goals. Relatively unique in the industry, we are flexible in our approach to construct investment menus, using both passive and active strategies. We also build custom target-date funds whose open architecture and glide paths can address your employees’ unique demographic and economic profile.

In short, we are organized to make unbiased recommendations with your company’s unique circumstances in mind.

Independent

As an employee-owned firm, we have no proprietary funds, allegiances to third parties or quarterly earnings’ responsibilities to shareholders that would otherwise compromise our ability to be fully objective to our clients. FiduciaryVest operates on a fee-only basis, so clients don’t have to worry whether we are being incentivized to make recommendations that are not in their best interest.

Focused

Your FiduciaryVest advisor’s goal is to make the complex simple: first, by listening closely to understand your thought processes, and then by recommending investment ideas that are aligned with your organization’s unique goals and objectives. Then, supported by our investment research group, we work side by side with you to design and implement custom processes that seek to optimize asset performance and streamline your decision-making, using both traditional and alternative asset classes.

Informed by a deep understanding of your financial goals, opportunities and risks, we remain mindful of how you intend to use your assets. With this focus, we seek to maximize returns given your established risk parameters and time horizon.

Today’s changing employee demographics, ultra-low interest rates and increasingly volatile markets have put unprecedented stresses on America’s traditional defined benefit plans. Those factors, combined with the expense of maintaining a pension plan, are causing many sponsors to re-examine exposures, lessen future obligations, and contemplate possibly freezing or terminating their plans.

FiduciaryVest is well qualified to assist plan committees with these critical deliberations, and creating plan designs and processes that address the following potential challenges and risks, including:

• Providing comprehensive institutional investment advisory services
• Designing and implementing plan enhancements or replacing the plan
• Measuring liabilities and conducting asset-liability matching studies
• Transferring pension risk to third parties
• Terminating and/or converting pension plans

For highly compensated earners, however, qualified plans place an annual compensation limit for the purposes of making contributions to a plan. One option that can give you and your key employees greater flexibility is a non-qualified deferred compensation plan (NQDC plan).

A NQDC plan is unlike other workplace savings vehicles. Instead of letting employees regularly defer a percentage of their salary into a segregated account (as with a 401k), a NQDC plan lets an employer defer paying a portion of an employee’s annual income until sometime in the future — five years, 10 years, or sometime in retirement. Deferring income allows the employee to defer any taxes on that compensation until it is withdrawn from the account. [add disclosures.]

As in a traditional pension, investments are professionally managed. And like a 401(k), the participant is promised an account balance rather than a monthly income stream. Under a cash balance plan, what is promised to a beneficiary is not a defined amount of pension at retirement (say, for example, 75% of the average an employee’s highest earning years), but a defined lump sum.