Summer is winding down, and with our 5-year strategic plan continuing to bear fruit, PenChecks Trust® is headed toward another very successful year. I’m also proud to announce that we will be celebrating our 30th anniversary in October. We began as a tiny start-up business, always looking for better ways to serve our clients and creating industry firsts as we grew. Three decades later we have more than 100 employees and are hitting new revenue milestones, yet despite the growth our cohesive family-oriented culture remains steadfast.
The past five years have paved a path to the future for PenChecks. In 2020 we developed a 5-year strategic plan with some very ambitious goals to grow the business. Our #1 goal was to elevate PenChecks to a fintech business partner serving the retirement industry as a whole with broader and more scalable tech-enabled solutions rather than being just a distribution processing company. It’s very rewarding before the end of those five years to put a stake in the ground and declare victory on the goals and objectives we set out in that plan. We have already begun constructing the next 5-year plan for PenChecks and are thrilled about where it will take us.
Let’s look at some of the major initiatives from our most recent 5-year plan and how they changed the way we operate as a business – starting with Amplify. Our primary operational goal at the beginning of the plan was to develop a new proprietary processing system that would allow us to amplify (pun intended) more and better ways to deploy our services. That was a huge component of the plan, and our new Amplify software played a leading role.
Our aim with Amplify was to create a faster, more efficient processing platform that could provide a better experience by making it possible to customize some of our traditional services that are now more leverageable to clients. With Amplify we can deploy our Premier Distribution services differently and better, and also customize a number of distribution solutions for specific industry segments, such as ESOPs for example.
Participants also benefit from a better experience with Amplify’s intuitive and easy to use platform and its companion portal MyBenefitElection.com. In addition to submitting benefit elections online, participants can track their distributions 24/7, review their account data, choose from multiple payment options, and more. Equally important, Amplify provides a faster, more efficient workflow for our processing staff to deliver a higher level of service for clients and participants.
Bigger Challenges Require World Class Leadership
Another key element of our strategic plan involved building our company’s leadership team. The addition of talented, knowledgeable key executives allows us to improve planning, refine strategy, and create internal environments for our people to thrive. This has a tremendous effect on our external environments and client trust. If our clients better understand all the ways they might leverage PenChecks to provide efficiencies and help them with processing and other services, it’s a win for our clients, their plan participants, and for PenChecks. We began looking very carefully for experienced professionals, not just with the leadership skills we sought but also for values that aligned with our company.
Chief Operating Officer Alexandra Gerritsen has been with us over a year now, and the resulting internal operational changes have been remarkable. Adding Ron Kaplan as Senior Director of Product Management has changed the way we think about product development life cycles. His practice of “shifting left” – moving more of our thought process and efforts about deployment of services to the pre-stages to get everyone thinking differently has brought more discipline to the process. Bringing Brian Furgala on board as Senior Director of Retirement Services Strategy added a very high level of industry expertise, capability and credibility. All of this has been extremely valuable with respect to product strategy.
With these talented experts putting themselves in the shoes of clients, users and participants we’re better able to understand the different outcomes we’re trying to achieve for all our constituents. We can then integrate that knowledge into product designs at an earlier stage, resulting in better strategy, lower costs, less time to market, and better user experiences as a whole.
Our Sales and Customer Relationship Management teams are making it possible for PenChecks to work with a wide range of bigger, more complex clients. As we continue to service larger and more sophisticated companies, especially recordkeepers, those integrations require more handling to get them across the finish line. The support functions of these two teams have allowed us to shorten the time to implement those relationships and integrations. We now have the personnel and infrastructure in place to make it easier to onboard and integrate new clients. This is essential for the next iteration of our 5-year plan to succeed.
One final note on leadership – we are committed to continued investment in the development of leaders throughout our organization. We believe our company-wide efforts to spearhead and promote an Emerging Leaders Program, Management Training, industry-specific professional education, enhancement of non-industry specific business skills and acumen, and exposing our people to top notch professional speakers, sets us apart. It will always remain a top priority for us to grow our people professionally and personally at all levels of the company.
Where Our Industry Is Headed
While the winds of change are always blowing within our industry, I don’t see massive trade winds or hurricane level disruptions coming down the road in the next year or two. Give or take another five to 10 years and it will be a different story due to many factors. Technology will certainly play a key role in bringing about significant changes during the next decade. As we develop our ability to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and systems that can learn and grow we will provide better experiences to all our stakeholders.
As the general population continues to grow in the digital age and they become more comfortable with managing their lives online, with less human interaction will come more opportunity. By continuing to expand our presence in the retirement and finance industries, every new product, service or solution we introduce will be intended to help create better outcomes for the people we work and do business with. If we get that right, regardless of what form it takes, we will be a success.
Some legislative actions will have a positive impact on the industry. The jury is still out on others, such as the new fiduciary rule. Consolidation in the TPA sector of our industry will increase, especially as Baby Boomer firm owners continue to do what they’ve been helping their clients do for years – retire well. And, there will always be opportunities for enterprising firms to create collaborative initiatives with larger financial institutions to better deploy their services.
All this and more will make the industry look and feel different over the coming years. Through all of this, continued innovation and the ability to develop collaborative tools and solutions with other like-minded, agile, high performing organizations is what will set PenChecks apart and elevate our industry and the market space as a whole.
To that end, in order to stay ahead we believe our next stage of innovation will involve collaboration and integration with other ambitious, tech-enabled service companies in the retirement industry. There are many firms we think we will be able to partner with to create new and novel tools that haven’t existed so far. From retirement industry service providers that are our core clients to individual retirees and plan participants, our goal is to help them all achieve better outcomes. Providing seamless payment processing experiences, saving time and money for our B2B processing clients, and providing better retirement savings choices for individuals will be primary among them.
People often ask me if I’m happy where we are as a fintech company and the success we’ve had, over the past few years in particular. I tell them, I’m very happy with how far we’ve come, but I’m WAY more excited about where we are going! I hope we’ll never be happy with where we are. If we work hard, we will always have opportunities to grow, push our industry, and better serve our stakeholders.
At the end of the day, everything we do is with and for individual people. From an external perspective, if we can add value for people and help them, that will always be attractive. From an internal perspective, if we can provide an amazing environment for our employees to thrive and grow, the sky is the limit for the value PenChecks can offer to the world.
Spiro G. Preovolos
President and CEO, PenChecks Trust®
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