It’s interesting to observe how trends affect one’s life from time to time. Ordinarily when one thinks of trends, they think of it in the context of the social side of life. For example, trends in music, fashion, television, etc. Every now and then trends start to appear in the professional world as well. One emerged trend of the last several years in the 401(k)/Pension business is the trend towards offering fiduciary services. Of course with this comes the inevitable misusage of the term fiduciary and a variety of marketing terms and sales gimmicks intended to take advantage of the trend without actually providing anything in return. Through the course of travel my coworkers and I often get many of the same questions surrounding ‘fiduciary’. Confusion in this area isn’t surprising as there is a lot of market noise, from the marketing terms like Co-Fiduciary or the sales tools like Fiduciary Warrantees to the newest trend, the selling of specific code sections as the different flavors of fiduciary.
We’ve all seen the various new categories of advisor; ERISA §3(38) Investment Manager, Full-Scope §3(21), Limited-Scope §3(21) and so on. On Linked-In there are lively discussions about it, articles are being published on it on Morningstar.com and an unfortunate result is some general confusion from a lot of Advisors of ERISA plans on what all of this is and what they should or should not be calling themselves or doing, not to mention what they’re allowed to do or not allowed to do under their Broker/Dealer contract if they are a registered rep. For that reason, we have created a new piece as an attempt to simplify and consolidate the most recent array of terminology.
Select the following link to view the complete document – Fiduciary…A Different "F" Word.
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