I think the one place where the retirement plan industry has failed is in communication to plan participants. The industry has done better in fee transparency and communicating with plan participants, but has done a terrible job in communicating with participants.
The problem that I find is that the industry as a whole doesn’t communicate well with participants because they don’t talk on a level that participants may understand and there is a lack of a connection with a good chunk of the audience. As I always say, I don’t think communication with participants has changed over the last 20 years even though the demographics of the participant audience. Communication that did well with baby boomers probably doesn’t do as well with millennials.
I think the communication is a huge problem because it was the baby boomers that were the better savers and once they all start pulling out assets out of the 401(k) plan, you may see a negative outflow that might hurt the industry as a whole.
