Cornerstone Capital Advisors

Our Fiduciary Services division assists businesses and non-for profit organizations with their employer sponsored retirement plans, endowments and other pools of assets. If you own a business or run a not-for-profit organization that sponsors a qualified retirement plan—a 401(k) or 403(b) plan, for instance—then you are a fiduciary. You are entrusted with retirement assets of your employees and with the power to protect their best interests in providing their retirement plan.

Employers who sponsor retirement plans have the responsibility of:

Educating employees about investment options
Providing investment options that are diversified
Creating a plan that is good for the company owners and the employees
Annually reviewing investment options
Providing investment options that are reasonably priced

Cornerstone offers services that support your role as a retirement plan fiduciary. In fact, in delivering these services, Cornerstone takes on the role of a fiduciary representing your best interests. We ease your legal liability by ensuring you fulfill your responsibilities to your employees and we help you watch over your employees’ retirement assets.

We offer three services assisting retirement plan sponsors:

We design your plan, manage its investments and monitor them on an ongoing basis with Fiduciary Retirement Plan Management.
We take responsibility for your plan’s investments with Fiduciary Investment Consulting.
We assess how you are fulfilling your responsibilities to employees in a Fiduciary Assessment.

Fiduciary Plan Management

This is the most comprehensive of our three Fiduciary Services. This service assists your company with designing the plan, finding the right investments, and managing the plan’s investments.

Plan Design

While your retirement plans should be designed to increase the likelihood of retirement income security for all employees, designing the plan to benefit owners and managers is also important. Our experience allows us to design the optimal plan for you and meet all non-discrimination rules.

The Right Investments (Fiduciary Responsibility)

Under ERISA rules, owners, officers, directors and members of your investment committee are fiduciaries, charged with managing your plan’s day-to-day investment decisions. However, you are allowed to transfer that responsibility to an independent fiduciary, relieving you of these chores and mitigating the legal liability that comes with them. As a Registered Investment Advisor regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cornerstone in this role allows you to concentrate on your business.

Managing Plan Investments

At least quarterly, Cornerstone’s Investment Committee reports to you in writing on the plan investments and recommends retaining or removing each investment option. Allowing you to concentrate on your business, not the investment management of your retirement plan. Each investment option is subjected to eleven tests in an effort to maintain superior risk-adjusted returns. Evaluating the cost of each investment option ensures expenses remain as low as possible. Our rigorous four-stage investment process provides a systematic discipline for managing your portfolio. Learn more about the Cornerstone Advisory Process (CAP).

Our Fiduciary Plan Management service provides you many additional benefits, including:

Institutional Investments

All the custodial firms we utilize offer institutional mutual funds which are not available in many retirement plans or to retail investors. Some of these funds have large minimum investment requirements that are waived for your plan participants. Other institutional funds offer low expense ratios that may not otherwise be available to your plan’s participants.

Life-Cycle Portfolios

Using the mutual funds offered in your plan, we create four portfolios geared to a plan participant’s retirement date. Employees within a few years of retirement will likely opt for the Conservative Portfolio while plan participants in their 20’s are likely to select the Aggressive Portfolio. By blending funds within the plan to suit each employee’s tolerance for risk, time horizon and investment objectives, these portfolios provide broad diversification and personalized asset allocation guidance that your employees might not otherwise receive, and they follow a disciplined investment strategy because we periodically rebalance the four portfolios.

Expenses

Business owners and managers of not-for-profit organizations often do not have a clear understanding of the expenses of their retirement plan. That’s because many vendors provide “packaged” plans and therefore are able to hide the fees in mounds of prospectuses and other documents. Cornerstone Capital Advisors discloses all the expenses in a simple disclosure statement, and we explain to you every aspect of your plan’s expenses until it is totally transparent to you.

Individual Analysis

Each plan participant is annually provided a two-page analysis allowing them to see if they have a retirement savings shortfall. The analysis also shows what changes the employee should make to their annual savings rate in order to replace their current income. During on-site education sessions with plan participants, employees receive more information about this two-page retirement report.

Quarterly E-Newsletters

Participants can sign up for our free quarterly email newsletter discussing a specific financial planning topic each quarter.

Annual Plan Sponsor Meeting

We meet with plan sponsors annually to review their plan level goals and objectives, as well as, benchmark the investments and activity on a plan and participant level.

Fiduciary Investment Consulting

We can assist your company or not-for-profit organization with finding the right investments and managing your plan’s investments. As an investment fiduciary, Cornerstone takes responsibility for all the investment aspects of your retirement plan. We work with you to implement a disciplined investment process by:

Analyzing the existing investment architecture
Conducting an asset allocation study and preparing an investment policy statement
Selecting the investments to fulfill the asset allocation strategy
Monitoring investments and conformity with the Investment Policy Statement

You benefit from our rigorous four-stage investment process, which provides a systematic discipline for managing your portfolio. Learn more about Cornerstone Advisory Process (CAP).

Fiduciary Assessment

Are you fulfilling all of your responsibilities as a retirement plan fiduciary? Unless you pay close attention to the details of your plan and know that it is complying with the federal ERISA statute, you could be leaving yourself and your organization open to a lawsuit.

A Fiduciary Assessment is a report card measuring how well you are living up to your obligation to act in the best interests of your retirement plan’s participants. It also determines whether you are keeping the necessary records to prove you have conducted yourself properly in your role as a steward of your plan. It provides a written attestation by our firm, a Registered Investment Advisor and investment fiduciary, stating that your are living up to your obligations to plan participants.

Even if you do not directly control your retirement plan’s investments day-to-day, you are still responsible for the investment activities covered in our Fiduciary Assessment. Our goal is to ensure your plan is compliant and to limit your exposure to any legal claims asserting failure in your obligation as a Trustee.

The benefits of Cornerstone’s Fiduciary Assessment include:

A rigorous, documented effort by an independent expert to uncover procedural missteps, thus limiting your legal liability.
Independent verification that your plan’s practices are in conformity with the Prudent Investment Practice for Investment Stewards, which are recognized applications based on federal retirement law, government-agency regulations and court rulings.
Assurance that the asset classes and investment styles of your plan’s investment options are prudent and offer a broad diversification.
Assurance that your process for researching your plan’s asset classes is prudent.
An explanation of all plan fees, with recommendations about how they can be lowered.

Other than Fiduciary Plan Management – our services are not just to participant directed qualified plans. We provide services to different types of Trustee directed investments such Profit Sharing Plans, Defined Benefit Plans, Endowments and Non Profits. The Fiduciary Assessments cover all of the Fiduciary types of Portfolios.