Institutional Consulting

For many decades, we have served as a team of highly experienced advisors to institutional investors, including nonprofits and foundations, as well as retirement plans for corporations and family businesses. Though each organization has its own needs and requirements, we understand that you have a desire to share fiduciary responsibilities with a trusted advisor while continuing to provide outstanding personal service.

Helping Institutions Meet Their Investment Needs

We put the resources of Wells Fargo Advisors to work for institutional clients like you by delivering thoughtful advice and sophisticated investment strategies through focused, client-centric consulting. We help organizations such as yours address today’s complex investment challenges through an integrated, goals-based investment process that enables them to redefine success, manage risk, and help fulfill their missions.

Disciplined Investment Process

We follow a disciplined process that helps to address your organization’s changing needs and provides you with a potentially higher probability of achieving your long-term investment goals. Each of these eight steps is accompanied by various action items, and if you’d like to learn more, please reach out to us.

Services Provided With Our Retirement Planning Consultant Agreement

Investment Policy Statement

We will work with you to establish an investment philosophy statement. Every plan should have an investment policy statement to guide the investment decision-making process for the plan. The key goal for an investment policy statement is to create an easy-to-use roadmap for selecting and monitoring investment options. It does not need to pinpoint specific details since to do so would create a very narrow band to operate within. Instead, the statement should provide general guidelines to remove the risk of individual preferences taking over, rash or short-sighted reactions, or random decision-making.

Service Provider Search

Every plan sponsor has a fiduciary responsibility to periodically conduct a service provider search. This search, which can also be used by business owners looking to start a new plan, will compare fees, investment options, and services provided to find an optimal fit for the client’s retirement plan.

Investment Search and Recommendation

We assist your plan sponsor clients with detailed investment analysis to aid them with plan investment selection and fund recommendations.

Performance Reporting

We assist the Plan Sponsor/Plan Trustee with ongoing evaluation of the Plan’s investment options (options may include money market, collective investment trusts, mutual funds or group annuity contracts) and the performance of the Plan’s portfolio over various time periods.

Employee Education

A successful plan must have successful participants. Plan participants will often turn to the plan sponsor for support with education around the retirement plan as well as overall financial wellness. As your Financial Advisor we can be a resource to the participants by providing ongoing education.

Plan Benchmarking

We help plan sponsors satisfy their fiduciary responsibilities to review and confirm the fees and services imposed on plan assets are reasonable.

Plan Fiduciary Meeting Support

Plan Fiduciaries must meet regularly to determine if the needs of the Plan are being met. In order to accomplish this objectively, the Plan Fiduciaries will need specific Plan data and various reports that we can help provide.

Ongoing Communications and Annual Review

We provide continuing educational programs, resources for plan participants, and enrollment meetings for new employees, and assist retiring employees with retirement plan distribution strategies. We also conduct ongoing meetings with your investment committee to review plan investment performance.

Additional Assistance

Backed by the intellectual capital and broad capabilities of our firm and its affiliates, we can connect you with the people and resources to help you with needs we are unable to address. Through our network of advisors, we strive to deliver strategies to help you manage the day-to-day and long-term responsibilities required in pursuing your institution’s goals. As we work together to address your evolving needs, we can make the broad capabilities of our firm feel much more accessible. This includes services targeted toward endowments, foundations, and nonprofits, as well as defined benefit plans and defined contribution investment consulting.

Our Commitment

Wells Fargo Advisors believes people and process drive performance. By offering distinctive advantages – such as identifying investment opportunities and managers positioned to help consistently achieve returns in excess of stated benchmarks, ongoing support, and risk mitigation – we will focus on helping plan sponsors achieve their stated objectives.