Mission: Prosperity – Intuit Duo Dishes!

People, some of this is going to read like a promo for two firms! However, we think it’s important to highlight real work that’s being done in the trenches to advance retirement savings access, ease of use, and payroll simplicity. Read on, take notes, innovate.

We are here today with a couple of great folks from Intuit: Erik Rettig who works on global policy and regulatory affairs, and his colleague, product manager David Sokolow. Erik, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Thank you! I sit on the team within Corporate Affairs which handles global policy and regulatory affairs for Intuit. That means I think a lot about the issues that impact our small business and consumer customers, including how we help support their financial lives, financial situations and financial health.

I came to Intuit from a trade organization – the Small Business Majority – where I focused largely on federal policy. In that role I got exposed to the state retirement initiatives, initially in Illinois and California. I got really interested in retirement policy through that connection.

You can imagine that I haven't been letting the team hear the last of what's going on in the retirement space from the public policy lens since. it's been an exciting journey and Intuit is an amazing company to work for. We have about 6 million small business customers in the United States and another million around the globe. And so of course this is an important topic to us and our customers.

David, your turn! How did you come to Intuit?

You bet.  I've been a product manager at Intuit for almost two years. I build products to improve our customer experience. That's anything related to helping customers get access to their money faster, to retirement services, to HR services. It's basically the customer experience expression of our mission at Intuit, which is powering prosperity around the world. I help build everything under the sun, working with designers and engineers, and interviewing customers to understand how we can best accomplish that.

I've been working in technology for a while. Before Intuit I ran a startup for a few years. I worked in the food delivery space on the tech side. And I made my way into financial technology, partly because this is one place where you can really have a big impact on people's everyday lives, especially when it comes to things like helping people save for retirement. It's been really inspiring to work here.

Intuit is known for products like QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint. Tell us how you get from these kinds of products to the retirement security space.

David Sokolow: It starts at the mission level. Our mission is to power prosperity for employers and for individuals. One key element of that is: how do we help those using our products to grow their savings rate. We're all aware of the retirement crisis in the US and how there's a substantial lack of savings.

That problem impacts small businesses acutely because traditionally they haven't been able to afford things like a 401(k) plan. As we were researching this space we realized there was a big opportunity for us to make a lot of positive change for our employers.

I sit within the QuickBooks world within our payroll organization. Payroll might be a boring topic to a lot of people but it really sits at the center of distribution for retirement. As a technology provider, we have this unique ability to one, provide access to retirement plans and accounts; and two, do it in a really easy and simplistic way. So small business owners and their employees can access these retirement tools in a way they never could before.

I think a lot of professionals in the retirement space will say that access is key. You can't really save for retirement if there is no 401(k) plan in the first place. So when we identified the opportunity to integrate access, we saw it as a place where we could get involved and make an impact in the space. It was a positive move for us from a business perspective, so that's why we were really curious to explore further.

One outcome of that work is a recently announced relationship with Guideline, a financial services provider. Can you talk about some of your focuses together?

David Sokolow: Yes, it's public now. We decided to work with Guideline to provide our small business employers with access to Guideline’s 401(k) administration services. We are specifically starting out with access via our online payroll service, but we're looking to grow access from there.

We decided to work with Guideline after we looked at a wide range of partners. By our analysis, Guideline offered the most affordable 401(k) from a price perspective. From a product design perspective, their program was very well-designed and very easy to use for employers. We observed that you could set up a 401(k) in less than 30 minutes. And from an ongoing administration perspective, Guideline’s plan was very easy for employers to manage. It was essentially hands-off for employers to manage the 401(k) on an ongoing basis. We know from working with small businesses that the biggest enemies for them in adopting these services is cash and time, and Guideline was solving both of those really well.

Tell us more.

David Sokolow: The last reason we were really excited about it was how Guideline thinks about the employee. They work with Vanguard to offer some of the lowest cost funds in the industry. What that means for a small business employee  is that they're getting the most out of their money that they could possibly get. And so that was something that we wanted to do.

We’ve now launched this partnership for our employers. It's available right within QuickBooks for them to easily adopt. We’ve done a very tight integration with Guideline. So an employer doesn't have to worry about entering their employees’ data. They don't have to worry about what happens if someone gets terminated, they don't have to worry about choosing funds or building out all of the administrative elements that are traditionally associated with adopting a 401(k). All of that comes day one. And it's been really great. We've seen really strong adoption even since the initial launch.

Awesome. On a similar basis, you’re considering some innovation into the state retirement security space.

David Sokolow: Yes. We see what's happening in California and Oregon and Illinois and the success of those programs. It's important for Intuit to work well with government stakeholders, especially as folks think about saving for retirement. So we're having those conversations now, and we're happy to help people make it easier to save for retirement, wherever that might be.

Erik Rettig: I'll add to what David said earlier. There are some tailwinds in the public policy space, not only last December at the federal level with the SECURE Act, but also as states keep marching forward. We, as a team feel like it's an exciting time to be offering more to our customers.

We are excited about what we see happening in the retirement ecosystem. These are big slow changes, but every day access and use gets a little bit easier. And the solution set  is getting richer.

David Sokolow: You can't solve the whole problem from day one. There is a big challenge in retirement security, and it's going to take years to address it – and involvement from government stakeholders as well as industry. The way we think about it at Intuit is essentially, where we have the opportunity to make it easier on our products to open access to a group that didn't have access, we're going to take that opportunity and slowly chip away at the problem.

What else do you see coming?

Erik Rettig: Well, think of what we're doing right now; we’re using all these digital tools. I think as consumers demand everything to be more digital that opens up a lot of innovation opportunity in this space. Since 2008 you’ve seen growth in fintech as we solved marketplace challenges brought on by the financial crisis. Now that story is shifting into other sectors of financial services, including retirement. That that coupled with all the innovation going on out in Silicon Valley and in David's world, that's really exciting.

David Sokolow: I would add, we're not just thinking about retirement at Intuit, we're thinking about financial security in general. If you look at a lot of our product focus, it’s really around how do we drive savings? How do we drive faster access to cash? Essentially we are focused on helping our users build towards those goals. We’re attacking these problems a number of different ways. I might approach it one way, working on payroll-based accessibility in the small business area, and the Turbo Tax product team can have its own impact with how they approach that savings problem.

With our ecosystem of the tax suite, personal finance apps, and tools for small businesses, we have a big opportunity to help with elements like sidecar savings accounts and other opportunities that help people get faster access to their cash as well as save more for the short and long term.

Our final question is more light and fun: do you have a favorite pandemic silver lining?

David Sokolow: Oh yeah. Your child.

Erik Rettig: It’s true, we have a new one at our house. That’s been exciting. I have a twin brother in Seattle and this time just reinforces the importance of family and how much I miss seeing and being with everyone. So I think it's forced me to take a look at things like having this new kid at our house, and he hasn't met his grandparents yet. It reinforces the value of family time.

We bet you've had a few “Baby Zooms”. David, can you top that?

David Sokolow: I actually got engaged during this pandemic – early on -- in May. We were three months into the pandemic at the time, and you never think it's going to keep going. I'm currently at my future mother-in-law's house for a couple of weeks. She would say it's the ultimate test for a relationship if you can make it through a pandemic. We have — and it's been a great experience from that perspective, to get closer to family and have this unusual downtime away from all of the other random activities that take up your day. So that's been awesome.

That's fabulous. Thank you both. We’re looking forward to your adventures and updates in 2021. Colleagues, you can connect directly by email: Erik Rettig and David Sokolow. You can follow these two on social as well: @RettigE and @DavidSokolow.

 In the interest of full disclosure: Massena Associates uses Intuit products. And, we pay for them, just like everyone else.

This piece was featured in the January 14, 2021 edition of Retirement Security Matters. For more fresh thinking on retirement savings innovation, check out the newsletter here.