Financial Professionals

No one knows your clients and their financial goals better than you, and no one can help you and your investors achieve those goals better than Unified Trust. We are a nationally chartered bank trust company, specializing in qualified retirement plans and have operated in a fiduciary capacity since 1985. We use our unique role as a discretionary trustee to help you improve outcomes, and work hand-in-hand with Advisor Partners to accomplish a common mission: to help people reach their retirement goals. That's a responsibility we take seriously.

Helping clients achieve retirement success doesn’t have to be difficult.

Unified Trust can help you improve retirement outcomes in a way that is measurable, effective and scalable. Interested in learning more? Call the Advisor Services group at 866-296-6682.

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Help sponsors deliver retirement success.

Unified Trust, one of the first discretionary trustees in the country, provides sponsors with the highest level of fiduciary oversight under ERISA. By choosing a discretionary trustee, your plan sponsor can help their participants improve their retirement readiness and enhance their fiduciary protection. We assume full responsibility and liability for management of the plan assets, while the sponsor simply needs to be prudent in hiring and monitoring our services. We even help make that job easier, as we provide tools and reports to assist in the ongoing monitoring of our services.

Help participants retire successfully.

Most participants are not financial experts, yet with most retirement plans their success depends solely on their ability to make expert-like decisions. We are not most retirement plans. At Unified Trust Company, we have a proven record and can offer time-tested solutions for improving the success rates of participants¹. Simply put, we do more to help participants achieve a successful retirement and we have the results to show for it. We also provide specific tools and resources to target off-course participants, thereby maximizing your time and driving meaningful results.

Make a measurable difference in the success of your plans.

Everyone is talking about outcomes, but very few companies can actually show that they are making a measurable difference in the lives of their participants. When you work with Unified Trust, we are behind the scenes, doing the heavy lifting, and providing a solution that has been demonstrated to improve results that you can deliver to your clients within the framework of CEFEX-certified, prudent fiduciary processes¹. This allows you to deliver results and adjust your service model to help grow your practice in an efficient and scalable way.

Behavioral finance tells us that most people follow the path of least resistance. Therefore, we believe that the default path for a participant should be the one that most likely leads to success. We call this philosophy the Unified Success Pathway^®. These intelligent defaults include:
- Instead of choosing to join, participants are automatically enrolled and must opt out if they choose not to participate.
- The Unified Progressive Savings Program^®enables plan participants to automatically save a little bit more each year.
- The default investment is a diversified model portfolio, prudently managed by investment professionals.
- Periodic rebalancing is handled automatically for participants.

The Success Pathway lays the foundation. For plans looking to build on that foundation and deliver personalized solutions for each employee, there is the UnifiedPlan^® Managed Account Solution³. The UnifiedPlan^® is retirement made easy.
- A Defined Goal: It starts with defining a goal for each participant: to replace 70% of pre-retirement income, adjusted for inflation and targeting as close to the normal Social Security retirement age as possible. We then default into the least amount of risk needed to succeed, making adjustments as needed along the way.
- The Personalized Plan: We create a personalized plan to improve the likelihood that the participant will reach his or her goal. The plan is highly individualized – we look at many possible solutions to find the one that’s best. Each participant gets a plan that’s unique to his or her situation, current savings and assets, and projected years until retirement.
- Actively Monitored and Managed: We review each participant’s situation every quarter to make sure they have a prudent asset allocation and their funded ratio is on track to meet their retirement goal. If investment changes are needed, we make them automatically.

Unified Trust is not just a 401(k) provider. We offer a full array of ERISA services including those for ERISA §403(b) plans; 457(b), Cash Balance plans and traditional Defined Benefit Plans.
DEFINED BENEFIT AND CASH BALANCE PLANS
A Defined Benefit or Cash Balance Plan can provide plan sponsors and their participants with an additional means of saving more toward retirement in a qualified, tax deferred manner. They also provide another source of retirement income by increasing retirement security through income diversification.

As a discretionary trustee we are held to the highest standards of accountability for our record-keeping and administrative services. We have detailed, documented processes that are independently audited and consistently followed. We offer a flexible approach:
- The Fully Bundled Model provides a personalized, full service option for Plan Sponsors looking for a comprehensive retirement plan solution. In the Fully Bundled Model, Unified Trust – along with the plan’s Advisor – will provide investment management, record-keeping, administration, and compliance and education services consistent with the plan’s services agreement.
- Our Unbundled or Record-keeping Model allows Plan Sponsors to work with local third party administrators, in concert with Unified Trust and the plan’s Advisor on the design and administration of the plan.
- The Trustee Only Model combines features from both the Bundled and Unbundled Models. The third party generally provides record-keeping, administration, and education services, while Unified Trust serves as the trustee of the plan.

Managing your plan’s administrative requirements can be cumbersome and can slow sponsors down from focusing on running their business, so we developed Admin Assist to provide sponsors with help in fulfilling the daily demands of the retirement plan. Our Admin Assist fulfillment service allows sponsors to outsource delivery of certain plan participant notices.

Your Solutions

Move the needle with an innovative suite of retirement solutions.

We have a "history of firsts" that have improved the chances of successful financial outcomes for our clients². It's not about taking risks, it's about advocating for progress and change to remain a leader in our industry. We know that the success of our solutions comes from our fiduciary responsibility to always put the interests of our clients first.

A Snapshot of Success

There are many organizations that will talk about retirement success but very few can or will quantify it. At Unified Trust, we have a record and time-tested solutions for helping people reach successful retirement outcomes, and we have the results to show for it! We’re proud to report these results to you, because these aren’t just percentages and statistics, they are actual people. Percentages mean nothing, people mean everything!

See the Results

Our proprietary Unified Fiduciary Monitoring Index^® gives us a balanced, long-term evaluation of each investment, relative to its peers.

Open Architecture – unlimited access to investment fund managers at the plan level – allows us to consider virtually any investment alternative, providing it is prudent and meets the plan’s Investment Policy guidelines.

Stable Value is an investment option that focuses on capital preservation with a goal of bond-like returns without the bond-like volatility.

We understand the importance of having an investment solution that accounts for changing market conditions, allowing for growth in good markets and defending against losses during major downturns. The Wealth Preservation Portfolio is a series of risk-based asset allocation funds that we offer exclusively for defined contribution and defined benefit plans.

As a discretionary trustee, Unified Trust has a duty to be loyal and to always act in the best interest of the participants. For this reason, we’re fee-based and take a no-conflict-of-interest approach.

PRUDENT INVESTMENT PROCESS

At Unified Trust, participant success is our compass.

Retirement success is best achieved with a holistic approach delivered by a discretionary trustee where all of the right things are done for the participant. An integral component of that is the implementation of a prudent investment process.

Advisor Support

Improving Outcomes: The Tangible Value Statement

It’s important to quantify your time. Consider your average-sized plan and number of participants; factor in the plan service time per year and set a goal of meeting with a percentage of the plan participants. What’s the result? On average, just a few minutes each quarter to do all the things necessary to help each participant improve their outcomes.

There is a better way. When you work with Unified Trust, you are working smarter, not harder. You’re able to quantify and deliver outcomes and get hours back in your day. Unified Trust becomes an extension of your team, developing, implementing, documenting and reporting on participant success, all within the framework of our fiduciary oversight as discretionary trustee.

Interested in learning more about you can deliver improved retirement outcomes in way that’s measurable, effective and easy? Call the Advisor Services group at 866-296-6682.

Your Team

Support from Unified Trust helps you focus on your clients.

Use the interactive map to find your dedicated team of professionals.

Advisor Solution Center

Enjoy access to education resources, marketing materials and more.

Advisors that work with Unified Trust will have access to our Advisor Solution Center. In the Advisor Solution Center you will find brochures, marketing pieces, whitepapers, multimedia files, sample documents, and more. Many of these pieces have co-branding functionality. This is also where you would customize and order enrollment kit materials.

To access the Advisor Solution Center, please login to your Advisor Account at the top of the screen. If you do not have one, you can request an Advisor Account.

Explore The Advisor Solution Center

Additional Services

From investment management to retirement income solutions our team of experts are here to assist you, the advisor, in delivering customized financial solutions to your individual investors. Our role as a fiduciary and discretionary trustee carries over to our Wealth Management services as well, so you can rest assured that we are always acting in your client’s best interest.

See Additional Services

Once and For All, Social Security is Alive!

Jason Grantz
Sep 17, 2018

Social Security will be there for us, perhaps in a different form or amount, but there. The real question for the retirement plan community is how to use it with pre-retirees in the accumulation and planning phases of their life.

Jason Grantz
Jul 12, 2018

Got five minutes? The topic of this blog post is covered in our Fiduciary Five Podcast series hosted by Chuck Hammond of the 401(k) Study Group. The Fiduciary Five Podcast…your fiduciary questions, answered in about five minutes.

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Jay Hunt
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Jason Grantz
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In this podcast, in addition to talking about us, I went into some detail regarding benchmarking of managed accounts as well as some thoughts regarding fiduciary outsourcing and benefits to advisors.

Jason Grantz
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To understand the question of how to apply revenue sharing in a 401(k) plan, first we must examine what revenue sharing really is, what form it takes and how it is commonly applied.

Jason Grantz
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As we get closer and closer to the applicability date of the fiduciary rule, the industry is starting to show its cards on how the rule will impact the landscape.

Jay Hunt
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In the sea of sameness set yourself apart and say something different. In an industry full of copycat products and similar solutions (albeit with different color schemes and logos affixed to the top of the proposals and marketing materials) consider offering something uncommon….. real value.

Jason Grantz
Mar 13, 2017

Whether or not the rule takes effect as-is or in some changed form, the rule has already made a major impact.

Contact Us Today

Whether you have a question you'd like us to answer or a brilliant idea you're ready to share, the team at Unified Trust is here to listen.

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