Defined Contribution Plan Consulting Process

Defined Contribution Plan Consulting Process

The Mason Process

Mason is an independent consulting and advisory firm with decades of experience serving institutional clients.  We deliver a comprehensive suite of retirement plan services, including fiduciary compliance review; mutual fund manager due diligence and selection; vendor benchmarking and searches; employee education plan design and oversight; and a comprehensive plan fee analysis.  There are four equally important steps to our process:

Step 1: Assessment – Assess the Current Situation
The first step of our process is to assess your current situation and level of fiduciary compliance.  We will review your goals, key plan documents, Investment Policy Statement (IPS), asset allocation models, investment options and the demographics of your plan participants.  In addition, we will review your current fee structure, vendors and employee education plan.

Step 2: Strategy – Design Strategy and Revise the Investment Policy Statement
In the second step of our process, we will discuss your committee’s IPS in more detail.  We will review and assess your current asset allocation models and will typically recommend some revisions and additions.  In most cases, as a result of this strategic portion of our work, we will assist your committee with revising your investment policy.

Step 3: Selection – Manager Due Diligence and Selection
Once the asset allocation strategy is designed and your new investment policy is in place, in this third step of our process we will evaluate your current mutual fund managers.  We may suggest that you maintain some or all of your current managers or we may recommend that you utilize an entire different group of managers.  We are not part of a large public financial services company and we do not design or promote our own (“proprietary”) products.  This leaves us free to search the world for the best mutual fund managers to fit your asset allocation strategies.  We believe that our due diligence and selection process is quite unique.  Click here to learn more about Mason’s approach to asset allocation.

Step 4: Review – Ongoing Plan Review and Reporting
During our relationship, we will monitor the mutual fund managers in your plan, review your plan vendors, provide benchmarking services, reassess your plan fees and coordinate with your record keeper to provide a suite of periodic reports that meets the needs of your retirement plan committee.  Typically, we meet in-person with our clients’ committees at least annually.