2015 Service Stars  | Individual

Matt Reilly

Helping a sponsor implement design and investment changes

RECORDKEEPER EMPLOYER: Aon Hewitt
TENURE WITH COMPANY: 17 years
BIO: Matt Reilly, a benefits service manager, works at Aon Hewitt in Atlanta, with both qualified and nonqualified plans. Previously, he spent several years in the fields of investor services, investment brokerage and commercial banking/recordkeeping services.
CLIENT: A plan sponsor in the Eastern United States 
PLAN TYPE: 401(k)
PLAN SIZE: $1 billion

“Matt Reilly is a tremendous asset to our team,” says the sponsor of a 401(k) plan in the Eastern U.S., who nominated Reilly as a Service Star but prefers to remain anonymous. “He has the unique ability to see the impact of plan changes across all affected groups, including recordkeeper, trustee, investment manager, plan sponsor and plan participants.

“Matt managed two very important projects for us in the past 12 months: 1) the introduction of a new employer contribution account, and 2) the implementation of managed accounts for a new qualified default investment alternative [QDIA],” the sponsor says. “He created and managed the project timelines and system updates, and went above and beyond to help make both initiatives a success. These projects were on the heels of a recordkeeper change only a couple of years ago, where he was instrumental in the implementation of our plan on the Aon Hewitt platform.”

When that sponsor made these changes to its plan, Reilly played a significant part in the project management. “My role is to be a go-between between the vast resources of our organization and what’s needed in the client’s organization,” says Reilly, a benefits service manager at Aon Hewitt. He typically gets a good sense of how much project-management assistance a sponsor wants and needs when he supports a plan’s transition onto his company’s platform or in the implementation of a plan-design change.

In helping to set up the new employer contribution account for the 401(k), Reilly made sure to “have the discussion early” about how to roll out the change, and he leveraged the experiences of other Aon Hewitt plan clients that have made similar shifts. Whenever a sponsor alters how it contributes to employees’ retirement accounts, he says, if the sponsor provides too little communication to explain the change, the potential exists for plan participants to see it as a loss to them. “The key thing is getting in front of that and making sure participants are not caught off guard,” he says of project-managing this type of change. “So we made sure they understood what was going on and the timing.”

When he helped the sponsor switch new and existing participants to the new QDIA, Reilly coordinated with the recordkeeper’s internal resources so Aon Hewitt could give the sponsor investment and fee analysis to support its decisionmaking. “Through the help of our investment-consulting team, we went through a lot of options with the sponsor,” Reilly recalls. “We helped it understand the pros and cons of each one, the costs, as well as the ongoing fiduciary-governance issues.”

The sponsor chose managed accounts in part because “it’s more of a personalized approach” for participants’ portfolios, Reilly says. With that choice made, attention turned to planning the rollout of the new default investment. The plan “had people, going back years, who had been defaulted,” he says, and that included both active and terminated employees.

The participant education Aon Hewitt put together was designed to help the sponsor “understand what it was getting into” with a managed account, Reilly says, and that the more customized offering could be good for participants. “We also wanted to make sure it was very clear to individuals that they were not being forced into this” and could opt for other investments, he adds. —Judy Ward
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