February 2024

How we will support you and your employees in 2024

A message from Stacy Bucchere, head of Institutional Client Management

Hello to 2024! We hope you are feeling refreshed and energized about your goals and plans for the year ahead. Perhaps you are thinking about strategies to support your employees’ financial wellness and ways to help them maximize their workplace benefits to pursue their goals. You might also be considering tools to help make it easier for them to manage their full financial lives. Or you may be thinking about the potential impact of the SECURE 2.0 Act on employer-sponsored retirement plans and the employees who use them.

We understand what’s on your mind and what matters most to you as a plan sponsor, because we’re in the trenches working alongside you to address the same important topics. Whether we’re developing innovative employee educational experiences to power financial wellness, optimizing plan design to help drive toward better plan outcomes or gaining a better understanding of the latest legislative proposals to facilitate compliance, we share your priorities and are here to help.

In fact, this year, you are going to see us doubling down on our commitment to be a trusted partner and resource for you and your employees. And we’ll strive to continually simplify the way we do business. I’m excited to share several ways we’ll be doing this.

Empowering your employees to navigate real-world financial challenges

Navigating one’s financial journey isn’t always easy. Needs and goals can shift in different phases of life, and unanticipated challenges can create hurdles along the way. Our educational programs will continue to help employees build strong foundational financial skills and equip them with resources, tips, tools and practical examples—helping them gain confidence to take charge of their everyday finances as well as plan for their futures. We continue to focus on delivering a holistic view of employees’ finances and invest in seamless technology to help make it easier to connect and manage the various aspects of their full financial lives.

Enhancing employee engagement and education

Our educational curriculum caters to different types of learners in different phases of their financial journeys and includes a broad range of proactive outreach and easily accessible resources. We are continuing to improve our approach based on research, behavioral finance, metrics and analysis that point to what’s working best—whether that’s using plain, active language; creating videos with fresh, modern appeal; sending artificial intelligence-enabled emails; expanding our offering of educational events or making it easier to access one-on-one consultations. In addition, we continue to develop and enhance innovative experiences that help employees make informed decisions in the moments that matter and deliver messages that guide them to suggested actions to improve their financial health.

Delivering a higher level of personalized experiences

Today, people expect the companies they interact with to understand their personal wants and needs in order to connect them to appropriate information and resources. Many of you have been asking for a deeper level of personalization in our employee experiences, and we’re excited to able to deliver it to you. When we can use and connect data available across the organization and provided by the participant, we can offer more individualized, relevant information and guidance to help them take the next steps toward improving their financial wellness and pursuing their goals. Our team is ready to discuss with you how data can help drive these more meaningful experiences and what we need from you to be able to offer them to your employees.

Growing the team that supports you

We are expanding our relationship management and participant engagement consultant teams to offer more of you the opportunity to benefit from the range of specialty knowledge and experience they can bring to your workplace benefits programs. The team is comprised of collaborators, innovators and doers who can assist with both the big picture and finer details of your plans—including strategic planning, day-to-day administration, employee education and support of key corporate initiatives. Your team will also be sharing best practices, introducing new ideas and matching your specific needs and goals to appropriate resources and services to help ensure you are leveraging the broad capabilities available to you through your relationship with Bank of America.

Helping you understand and implement provisions of the SECURE 2.0 Act

We recognize this legislation is top-of-mind for you right now, as the provisions can affect your employer-sponsored retirement plans as well as how your employees prepare for retirement. You can continue to count on us to provide you with the most current information, guidance and resources regarding the new legislation to help you better understand the changes enacted, what they mean for you and your employees and how to address applicable requirements. Be sure to check out our SECURE 2.0 Act plan sponsor website for the latest updates. We will also be keeping you informed of enhancements we make in support of the SECURE Act provisions.

Using research and analytics to provide insights and identify opportunities

In a constantly evolving world and transforming workplace, we will continue to be vigilant in tracking trends and conducting research to help better address current needs, anticipate emerging issues and be proactive with solutions. We will also use benchmarking analytics to help identify potential plan improvements to keep your programs competitive.

Continuing to listen to your feedback to improve experiences

Our ongoing interactions with you are very important in helping guide our work. Your input and feedback help us enhance services, improve tools and create more meaningful and valuable experiences for you and your employees. Your voice is reflected in everything we do, and we encourage you to continue to reach out and share your thoughts and ideas.

We’re excited about what we have planned this year and the opportunities to work together. We know you have a lot going on, so we encourage you to lean on us and let us help shoulder some of that responsibility. We can’t say it enough: We’re here for you. Let’s keep the momentum going.