High-profile retirement plan industry personalities Bonnie Treichel and Matthew Eickman are teaming up to tackle, among other things, retirement income.
Eickman will transition from his role as National Retirement Practice Leader at Qualified Plan Advisors, parent company Prime Capital Investment Advisors announced Thursday. He will join Treichel, founder and chief solutions officer of Endeavor Retirement, as Managing Partner of Endeavor Law and Chief Content Officer of Endeavor Retirement.
“My intention in starting [Endeavor Retirement] three years ago was to help advisors from a more practical standpoint,” Treichel said. “And then when I started the law firm a year ago, I thought about how to make legal work more practical and accessible for financial advisors. How can we take and, when possible, create a flat fee arrangement for those advisors and their plan sponsor clients? As more retirement income, managed accounts, and those types of solutions come to market, advisors don’t need someone to say no. They need someone to say, ‘Here is a scalable and practical way you can do it.’”
Noting that he’s been an active ERISA practitioner for two decades (in addition to his advisory work), Eickman said the lifetime income marketplace has changed significantly in that time.
“This focus on the need for participant solutions is more apparent than ever before,” he argued. “There’s so much resistance, whether I’m doing American Bar Association activities or speaking at conferences to advisors about lifetime income, managed accounts, and advice. There’s this sense that so many are operating from a position of fear or, at best, skepticism. I’ve been thinking for quite some time about how I can work with advisors, plan sponsors, and other service providers to bring those solutions to market and to have them utilize them in a safe way.
He added that joining with Treichel was a “natural pairing."
“I think collectively, it sounds a little cliché, but it should be a ‘one plus one equals three’ type of outcome.”
Both agreed that the fact they were advisors in addition to ERISA practitioners is a valuable differentiator.
“The legal advice I give now after being an advisor is different than what I gave before,” Treichel said. “Of course, everything was technically accurate. It just lacked that practical piece of, for example, telling a million-dollar plan to do a VCP. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s now so much more about describing the spectrum of risk. It has so much more practical aspect to it because I’ve actually sat in the committee room as an advisor.”
The announcement came on the heels of a recent paper co-authored by Eickman and Treichel titled, A Call to Action on Retirement Income—It’s Time to Solve the Problem, a comprehensive piece that details current statistics and concerns while offering answers to commonly heard objections.
Prime Capital Investment Advisors was effusive with its praise of Eickman.
“Over the last decade, our firm has been ahead of the market when we launched CITs, built a proprietary financial wellness platform, and worked with a consortium of industry leaders to bring in-plan retirement income to participants through Income America,” Chairman and Managing Partner Scott Colangelo said. “Matthew has been a critical part of identifying what’s next in our industry and propelling our firm’s growth into a national leader in those areas.”
