“Small market startups, that’s where the growth and opportunity are,” Stephen Daigle said. “It really comes down to how efficiently you can set them up. The reality is that small businesses and plans are very complex, different, and unique.”
Daigle, Co-Founder and CEO at retirement plan marketplace Fiduciary Shield by BidMoni, noted that firms like Vestwell and Guideline have done an excellent job at being new product providers in the space, “but the reality is there are a lot of legacy firms that are good at more complex plan design, plans that are screwed up, things like that.” 
For that reason, he and his team took a different angle, a Priceline-like approach.
“We said, ‘Hey, there are really good old and new brands, but at the end of the day, you want to find the one that’s best for you,’” Daigle added. “We focused on that; not just being able to shop and compare different 401(k) providers but how to efficiently onboard, sign the paperwork, pay the fees, and upload documents. For the advisor, if they have a really clean user experience, they’re going to sell a lot of plans.”
The firm has a four-step focus. The first is prospect identification.
“Every advisor, regardless of if they’re a specialist or non-specialist, has to identify who these small businesses are. There are a lot of 5500 tools, but everyone kept asking, ‘Hey if I’m in California with a business with five employees, how do I find out who these businesses are?’ We built really the first-ever startup prospecting tool that identified 4.5 million businesses that didn’t have a plan, and we provide the number of employees on the payroll. It allows these advisors to say, ‘These are people all around me.’”
He realized there are several methods to fund smaller plans; safe harbor, elective, non-elective, profit sharing, SECURE 2.0 tax credits, etc,’ which led to the second area of focus.
“We predictively analyze thousands of scenarios and basically tell them not only the tax credits down to the cent but the top way to fund a plan,” Daigle explained. “That’s a game changer for people who have no clue what any of that means.”
The third step is identifying the vendors to implement the plans, such as the payroll providers with whom to integrate.
Lastly is the digital onboarding process through DocuSign and how the client can get signed up and onboarded in 15 minutes.
“We’re targeting both the small market and non-specialist, the two-plan Tonys,” Daigle concluded. “There’s what, 2% of advisors that specialize in retirement plans, the NAPA members? If you look at what Mike Griffin at UBS is doing, he’s trying to engage the generalist and say, ‘Hey, it’s more likely that I can get a wealth manager to sell three plans than a [retirement plan specialist] to sell 300 in the small plan space. That, truly, is where we see the opportunity. Solving the coverage gap will come from advisors, but the specialists of the world only have so much bandwidth. That leaves the door open for everybody else to also help solve the coverage problem.”
