Vanguard Pulls Together Advice Aggregation Service

June 5, 2003 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Participants in retirement plans at The Vanguard Group now can get advice recommendations about their plan assets - as well as on investments outside the plan.

The mutual fund giant has rolled out transaction and data aggregation capabilities to retirement plan participants whose employers provide access to the Financial Engines investment advisory service. According to a news release, Vanguard is the first employer-sponsored retirement plan provider to combine these financial management capabilities for retirement plan participants.

The data aggregation capability allows participants to automatically load the outside-the-plan personal financial data into the Financial Engines service. Employer clients that sign up for Financial Engines’ Total Portfolio Advice service will also receive data aggregation services. The Total Portfolio Advice service analyzes all participant holdings.

The new transaction capability allows participants to immediately act on the advice recommendations provided by Financial Engines with a mouse click.

Track Record

In 2001, Vanguard and Financial Engines announced that they would make Financial Engines’ investment advice available at no charge to participants in Vanguard  plans that subscribe to the service (see  Vanguard to Offer Free Advice From Financial Engines ). Since that time, Vanguard has rolled out Financial Engines’ investment advisory service to 137 of Vanguard’s plan sponsor clients, covering more than 554,000 employer retirement plan participants, or 23% of the participants Vanguard serves.

Also, according to Thursday’s rollout announcement, Vanguard and Financial Engines continue to see results regarding how plan participants are benefiting from advice. For example, since introducing the Financial Engines’ service in June 2001, 21% of Vanguard users increased their level of plan savings.

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