Human Interest, a retirement plan provider backed by BlackRock, has launched a platform to help specialist and non-specialist financial advisors manage client 401(k) plans and alert them to wealth service opportunities for employees saving in those plans.
Human Interest’s PartnerConnect platform will give advisors and others, such as CPAs, a single platform to manage retirement plans for the roughly 35,000 companies in its recordkeeping system. Through the platform, advisors can make retirement plan investment design choices directly or with approval from the business, depending on their regulatory status.
Advisors will also have access to a feature called ParticipantIQ, which will alert them when a plan participant has a triggering event, such as a salary increase, retirement or leaving for a new role—all opportunities for engagement.
Rakesh Mahajan, Human Interest’s chief revenue officer, said the solution is partly for specialist 401(k) advisors who, in Human Interest’s assessment, are losing “thousands of hours a week” managing client plans with legacy providers. It’s also for non-specialist advisors being asked to start plans for business-owning clients, who can then leverage the tool for wealth service opportunities.
“We sat with dozens of advisors in the last nine months and said, ‘If you had a magic wand, what would you like it to be? What would you like it to do?’” Mahajan said. “We’re a tech company that happens to be in 401(k). … We’re using tech to solve every problem we can.”
Human Interest, based in San Francisco, was founded about a decade ago as one of a handful of firms seeking to disrupt the legacy recordkeeper space dominated by players such as Fidelity Investments, Empower and Vanguard. In 2023, BlackRock made a minority investment in Human Interest, which aligned with its focus on retirement investing and income.
Since then, Human Interest has bulked up its plan count annually and is tracking at about 2,000 new plans a month, according to Mahajan.
To create its new platform, the recordkeeper worked with dozens of advisors for input on pain points, such as the need to fax or email documents back and forth with clients to manage their 401(k) plans.
“We had some advisors screen share their experience with some of the legacy providers, and it was just bad,” Mahajan said. “We knew we could do better.”
The ParticipantIQ aspect of the platform syncs with payroll providers to alert advisors when a participant’s job or income changes. It’s also customizable for advisors to focus alerts on savers of certain income levels, which Mahajan said came via advisor feedback.
“Some of the wealth advisors that we talked to said they only care about people making over $250,000 a year, or some were interested in more like $150,000, or some were at $175,000,” he said. “The point is they can customize it to what they want.”
Human Interest will roll out a demo of PartnerConnect at the National Association of Plan Sponsors 401(k) conference in Las Vegas at the end of April.