Everest Reinsurance Company

NOMINATOR COMMENTS

Everest Reinsurance Company, a global underwriting firm, embodies a “never-resting” culture: It is continually enhancing its retirement program to improve outcomes for employees.

Besides having a meticulously designed plan and exceptional colleague engagement—resulting in an average account balance of $169,012—it also prioritizes financial education and empowerment. Among other programs, it offers My Total Retirement, through which participants have access to personalized advice and professionally managed accounts. Participants also can receive online advice through the program, including specific recommendations to implement themselves. More than 12% of participants are enrolled.

Paulette Olin, SVP, Global HR Operations and Benefits, Everest Reinsurance Company

PLANSPONSOR: Please cite any noteworthy initiatives you have taken in the past 24 to 36 months that have produced results to improve your plan, and describe the results.

Everest Reinsurance: In 2022, Everest had a participation rate greater than 95% and an average deferral rate of 8.4%. We added automatic escalation of 1% each year until reaching a goal of 10% and conducted a re-enrollment of any colleagues who were not participating or were deferring less than 3%, to help them maximize the matching contributions. As a result, our participation rate is now 97%, and nearly 98% of our colleagues are maximizing the match.

We also decided to terminate the Everest Reinsurance Retirement Plan—our pension plan—effective in June 2024. For the group of active colleagues affected by the plan freeze, we increased our employer fixed contribution in the current savings plan by an additional 2% for two years.

As to other recent benefits, we have implemented several SECURE [Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement] 2.0 Act provisions, including increasing force-outs to $7,000 from $5,000, adopting automatic portability of small balances and allowing distributions for domestic abuse or federally declared disasters.

PLANSPONSOR: Please explain the ongoing governance efforts of those involved with the plan meant to ensure its compliance and effective operation.

Everest Reinsurance: The investment committee meets quarterly to review the investment lineup and fund performance, monitor fees, and stay updated on regulatory and legislative developments. We recently implemented Morgan Stanley’s 3(38) services. Our team also meets with the Empower service team weekly to discuss ongoing plan administration and cyclical deliverables such as regulatory mailings, testing and the Form 5500 filing.

PLANSPONSOR: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Everest Reinsurance: We offer our colleagues various educational resources. Through Empower’s personalized dashboard, they can receive comprehensive insights as to their financial well-being—e.g., their retirement progress, net worth and actionable goals. We also partner with Empower to conduct monthly webinars covering a range of financial topics and with Origin to provide our colleagues with access to financial advisers worldwide at no cost.

This year, for our Plan Sponsor of the Year profiles, we are publishing Q&As based on the finalists’ applications and nominator comments. Responses are edited and may be paraphrased. In cases where the finalist self-nominated or, on its application, referred judges to the nomination for the answer, we have attributed those nominator answers to the plan sponsor.