Retirement Plan Advising How to convert plan participants into wealth clients

Imagine you're meeting with a plan participant and his wife when the employee mentions he has an old IRA with a balance of about $600,000 and his wife has a few hundred thousand in an old 403(b).

As it turns out, finding close to $1 million to manage is not unusual. According to a 2025 Retirement Leadership Forum report, every 10 participant meetings reveals a $400,000 prospect in a small plan, and a $1 million prospect in a large plan.

What should be unusual is that the employees had never before met with a financial professional.

Why employees may not reach out for financial guidance

How is it that these employees went years without ever connecting with a financial professional from not just one, but two, separate retirement plans?

The answer is that the employees probably sat through the type of retirement discussions everyone dreads: generic plan overviews that can be so impersonal as to feel irrelevant. The type of meeting that probably does little to inspire confidence that the financial professional leading the meeting could provide valuable guidance for assets, whether in-plan or out.

It does not have to be this way.

Offering general (but not generic) education meetings along with more focused discussions and one-on-one meetings can help employees get more from their benefits and help plan professionals cultivate relationships that can extend beyond an employee’s working years.

To identify small-group topics or individuals you may want to meet, consider using agentic AI if your company’s AI policy allows it. Agentic AI can help perform specific tasks, like parsing recordkeeper data for specific information. In this instance, agents could sift through a plan’s demographic information and identify individuals who could be prospects for wealth discussions.

11 ideas to help you get started

These tips can help you create more meaningful interactions and help turn plan participants into wealth clients over time.

1. Create an education policy statement that outlines topics you want to discuss throughout the year with different age groups and how often you want to meet with employees.
2. Get plan sponsor support. Ask employers to highlight financial guidance as a work benefit and to take advantage of it. Requiring attendance can also help.
3. Use a game show format. Let teams compete to answer questions about retirement, retirement plans or any other topic.
4. Hold after-hours events for those near retirement. Invite employees to bring their partners to discuss topics like retirement income, IRAs and Social Security. This approach could help you lock in the plan's rollover business.
5. Bring groups together based on balances and age to discuss options. For example: near-retirement employees with $1 million or under-30s with at least $5,000.
6. Develop small-group discussions based on age and gender.
7. Hold meetings online, in-person or both.
8. Create and share short, single-topic videos that will resonate with different age groups.
9. Host online office hours. Employees can book time in advance.
10. Use personalized marketing. Emails for young professionals, for example, can mention that you understand they could be juggling student debt along with other financial challenges and your discussion will cover how to navigate them.
11. Contact Capital Group. We can help you get organized, identify messaging opportunities and find resources and tools that can help you create meetings with impact.