RECORDKEEPER COMPANY: Voya Financial
TENURE WITH COMPANY: 15 years
BIO: Adria Campbell is a client relationship manager at Voya Financial in Braintree, Massachusetts. She started out working in entry-level plan management on the corporate side and then moved to the tax-exempt market, working on plans with assets that are $1 billion or greater.
CLIENT: Michigan Office of Retirement Services
CLIENT INDUSTRY: Government
CLIENT HEADQUARTERS: Lansing, Michigan
CURRENT PLAN ASSETS: $7.4 billion
CURRENT PLAN PARTICIPANTS: 167,600
Shifting to a new provider and altering the administration and assessment of self-directed brokerage account (SDBA) fees meant that the Michigan Office of Retirement Services had to find the right way to communicate information to the 6,000 participants using the brokerage window. For Client Relationship Manager Adria Campbell, this meant employing plenty of proper and effective communication.
“One of the big pieces of the project was a reaffirmation that participants [in the SDBA] needed to sign off to say, “‘I understand. This is what I’m doing,’” says Campbell. “We had to come up with a plan to reach these people, have them sign something, get it back to us. [And we needed to track this. We had to] ensure that everybody received some sort of communication letting them know that we needed this signature in order for them to continue down the path.”
Because the client migrated from a revenue-sharing fee structure to a flat-dollar administrative charge, fee collection concerning SDBAs needed to be restructured, and SDBA participants needed to know that a minimum balance had to be maintained in the core account for the collection of those fees. In communicating the switch to participants, Campbell started by aligning specific tasks to integral department members. “I had to powwow with all the groups, to get everybody on board and to lay out what our needs were going to be,” she says.
“What she did was help us keep track of the updating of our fee schedule,” says John Schiller, departmental analyst for the Office of Retirement Services.
In order to efficiently organize and maintain the schedule’s timeliness, Campbell worked with several groups and departments, including the call centers, brokers and marketing—internally at Voya, with the operations team. One responsibility included mailing out two separate forms—one to current SDBA account holders, to notify them of the fee change, and the second to new account holders, serving as an acknowledgment form alongside an application.
“It’s not often we do mailings for 6,000 people with the intention of getting 6,000 responses back to us,” says Campbell.
“Normally, mailing is just informational—you want to make sure you’re getting information out to the participants. In this instance, we needed them to take action.”
And if one of the 6,000 participants failed to reply?
“We sent out reminders,” says Campbell. “We had touch points along the way, to see who hadn’t responded.”
Other duties included assigning the operations team at Voya to index and keep track of plan fee forms, and developing talking points for call centers. While the list of tasks was lengthy, that didn’t mean the time frame got protracted. Creating the two forms, working with the various departments, managing the entire process, and having 6,000 participants respond was all completed in just under two weeks. —Amanda Umpierrez
“One of the big pieces of the project was a reaffirmation that participants [in the SDBA] needed to sign off to say, “‘I understand. This is what I’m doing,’” says Campbell. “We had to come up with a plan to reach these people, have them sign something, get it back to us. [And we needed to track this. We had to] ensure that everybody received some sort of communication letting them know that we needed this signature in order for them to continue down the path.”
Because the client migrated from a revenue-sharing fee structure to a flat-dollar administrative charge, fee collection concerning SDBAs needed to be restructured, and SDBA participants needed to know that a minimum balance had to be maintained in the core account for the collection of those fees. In communicating the switch to participants, Campbell started by aligning specific tasks to integral department members. “I had to powwow with all the groups, to get everybody on board and to lay out what our needs were going to be,” she says.
“What she did was help us keep track of the updating of our fee schedule,” says John Schiller, departmental analyst for the Office of Retirement Services.
In order to efficiently organize and maintain the schedule’s timeliness, Campbell worked with several groups and departments, including the call centers, brokers and marketing—internally at Voya, with the operations team. One responsibility included mailing out two separate forms—one to current SDBA account holders, to notify them of the fee change, and the second to new account holders, serving as an acknowledgment form alongside an application.
“It’s not often we do mailings for 6,000 people with the intention of getting 6,000 responses back to us,” says Campbell.
“Normally, mailing is just informational—you want to make sure you’re getting information out to the participants. In this instance, we needed them to take action.”
And if one of the 6,000 participants failed to reply?
“We sent out reminders,” says Campbell. “We had touch points along the way, to see who hadn’t responded.”
Other duties included assigning the operations team at Voya to index and keep track of plan fee forms, and developing talking points for call centers. While the list of tasks was lengthy, that didn’t mean the time frame got protracted. Creating the two forms, working with the various departments, managing the entire process, and having 6,000 participants respond was all completed in just under two weeks. —Amanda Umpierrez
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