(How) Will Blockchain and Decentralization Change the Future of Retirement Savings: We Go Exploring with Sean Hanna
We met Sean Hanna in a friend’s living room ahead of a wedding early in this millenium. Sean was and is the founding publisher of InvestmentWires – including 401kwire.com, mutualfundwire.com, and a new publication – CeFiWire.com – focused on institutional investors and Web3 tech. Does this matter to you? We think it does. Sean has been a steady observer of and reporter on the financial services industry for more than 30 years. To say that he’s seen a lot is an understatement. We recently cornered Sean to grill him on what might be coming for the retirement savings and inclusion space. This is a bit long form but we think it’s worth it. And the best stuff is at the end. #ofcourse
We’re going with interview form this week.
Lisa Massena
Okay, we're ready. Let's go. We are here with the amazing and well-informed Sean Hanna. Sean, please share a bit about yourself.
EARLY DAYS
Sean Hanna
People always ask whether I worked in the industry. So I have not ever worked for an industry firm. I started as a reporter, covering GICs – if you remember what those were. When I started covering the industry in 1990, it was very different than it is today.
Lisa Massena
That was back in the day when we actually had magazines, right? Things were printed.
Sean Hanna
The "GIC/BIC Yields and Market Report" newspiece started in 1990. It was a printed paper newsletter. The core of it was that we would publish GIC rates. That way if you were in the market, you could know what people were paying. And we wrote editorial around that.
In 1998 I left that company to start 401kwire.com on the internet, then the new new thing. We felt we had to start right then or we’d be passed by.
So I started as a reporter right out of college, in my early 20s. It's given me one perspective that I think a lot of other people may not have, in that I've been interviewing the C-level decision makers in the industry since 1990. I've known many of the current leaders since they were much more junior and have been able to see the industry develop at a strategic level.
JUST THE BREAKING NEWS, PLEASE.
Lisa Massena
What’s at the heart of your publishing?
Sean Hanna
401kWire.com was where we started this online venture. MutualFundWire.com was our second offering. 401kWire is aimed at the decision makers at the in the industry -- the people running the providers, asset managers, what we call KPAs, the 401(k) focused advisors.
Our bread and butter is that we break news.
It's all hard news, telling people what they don't know. It’s my theory that our readers know their own business and context but they don't necessarily have the facts . So we give them the facts, they can fit into their own context. And every company is a little different. How you use those facts — your strategy — is going to vary from others in the industry.
We can't tell you your strategy. But we can tell you what we've learned about what is going on right around you. Our goal is that you're going to learn things from us that you're not going to learn somewhere else, and you're going learn a little bit faster.
NEW AND IMPACTFUL: ONE NEWSMAN’S VIEW.
Lisa Massena
We have talked about shifts in the retirement savings industry over the last 30 years. What are some of the newest and most interesting changes that you are seeing crop up? Feel free to mention Auto IRAs! (shameless plug).
Sean Hanna
(Laughing) Actually, the state Auto IRA programs have had a big effect.
What we're seeing from the state programs is they're driving retirement account adoption in the small employer market in a way that hasn't happened in the past – which I guess was the intent. But the interesting side is they're driving adoption of 401(k)s – we’re not just seeing companies going only into the state Auto IRA.
Because of this we're seeing some new players come into the space that specialize in that market. So it's the Human Interests and the Guidelines of the world, and what some of the payroll companies are doing. The state programs are operating in a space that the traditional providers can't really compete economically. It's opening the door to a breath of fresh air in that there are new recordkeepers coming in, after many years of consolidating in this shrinking pool of who the providers are.
In the long run that's probably good, because they'll bring in new ideas and capabilities that others will have to react to, or adopt, or build upon. Yeah, that's one very interesting change, actually. It's probably actually the key one. With their actions the state programs are also bringing in venture capital with new funding and new eyes on the industry.
UNINTENDED OUTCOMES?
Lisa Massena
That’s a cool perspective. Let’s move from states to the federal view. There's been a ton of talk about the SECURE Acts. Is there anything in this legislation that, from your breaking news perspective, you see as especially valuable?
Sean Hanna
Yeah, so the one thing actually -- and I haven't seen it talked about as much as some of the other provisions – is this: Are SECURE and SECURE 2.0 combined opening the door for PEPs?
One of the things we're seeing is PEPs potentially eating the world -- where large plans are moving or looking at moving to PEPs -- which is probably not the intent that the people who wrote SECURE 2.0 had. The fact that it is a path to removing some of your fiduciary liabilities as a plan sponsor is seen as a very big deal among larger plans.
Aon has a product out, as do some of the other big consulting firms like Willis Towers Watson. We expect to see more. I find this interesting, because the large market has been kind of frozen with not a lot of innovation for more than a decade at this point. This trend will open the door to competitors to come into this space with innovation we haven't seen before or recently.
Ironically, because of the state programs, the smaller market employers are more likely moving to these startups providers, which are actually not PEP arrangements.
So it's kind of a bifurcation in a strange way. And I think advisors are a little bit worried about bringing in PEPs as they see it as a potential conflict with their businesses and how they traditionally tie themselves to the plan sponsor as expert support.
INTERSECTIONS.
The other trend in the very large market is the much-talked-about-now-happening merger of health plan services with 401(k) services. So the large plan providers are hoping to get the plan have sponsors to bundle all of that with one administration package.
Alight's doing that, and Voya's doing that. Voya bought a health care administrative company to fold into its package. I think the goal is Human Resources servicing. People want fewer points of contact. And benefits services still need to be more highly integrated
Providers are trying to simplify their HR clients’ jobs. When HR can tie health and savings benefits together in one platform for employees, this theoretically simplifies the relationship the employee has through the employer to the provider.
Lisa Massena
We've seen some interesting information lately indicating that the employer is one of the places that workers would prefer to get key information on financial wellness and health care and how to knit all these things together into a better life -- that employers are very trusted source of that information.
Sean Hanna
Right. And I think right now for the traditional bifurcation of the platforms means the employer has had a hard time giving all the information easily to their employees. Unification simplifies that -- well, that's the theory. We're still early in that process.
So PEPs, the healthcare and 401(k) integration, the state programs changing the small market, those are three big trends.
Some of the trends that had been going on, like open architecture and adding multi-asset managers, are kind of reversing. With the move to target date funds and to more simplified managed account-type products for employees mean that you don't need all of those special flavors in your fund lineup. Instead they're being packaged, which is allowing some of the providers to trim their fund lineups.
This allows them to focus more on their own proprietary product, or limit the number of relationships they have with outside asset managers. Which means you are seeing the number of asset managers targeting DCIO shrinking.
RETIREMENT INCOME.
And then I guess I’ll make everybody mad with this one. The other big trend that everybody talks about is retirement income solutions. And that's something that frankly, we still don't see being that widely adopted yet. Over the past 20 years a lot of providers have rolled out various types of retirement income or annuity solutions, and they've yet to take hold. So I know SECURE 2.0 actually provides some incentives for that market. So we'll see if it takes root this time, or not so much.
The providers of these products have been moving mountains trying to satisfy all the objections that they hear in the market -- the fact that you locked in, or you're only working with one insurance company, or that at the plan sponsor level it's not portable if they change providers, they get stuck with old providers. There have been solutions built for some of those things. So, it may still be early for the adoption from that perspective.
Lisa Massena
The flip side of it is that it's really interesting to see a circumstance where you have an evolving set of solutions. And you certainly have an audience on the other side who absolutely want retirement income, and some certainty around it. But the bridge between them has been super tricky.
Sean Hanna
I think investors through 401(k) plans want safety. And when you talk about retirement income, you're actually using bad words. I was told by a branding person years ago that retirement is the last step before death. So when you talk about retirement products, you're practically showing funeral homes and caskets, which is not good branding.
Lisa Massena
Maybe a better word is not “retirement”, but something else. And then a better concept around lifetime income is maybe “future paycheck”.
GOING GEORGE JETSON.
Okay, let's talk about the future. You started a new newsletter - CeFiWire. What does that stand for, and why should folks in the retirement community care about digital assets, new platforms and blockchain?
Sean Hanna
CeFi is centralized finance, in which financial services firms use distributed ledger technology, and is the other side of the coin from decentralized finance. In decentralized finance, you don't need any intermediaries, you're just trading peer to peer.
As part of this you hold your own what they call “keys”, which is how you claim your Bitcoin and things if you're in that space. (here’s our link to a keys and wallet description – related to crypto – true as well for other digital assets).
There was the saying in that crowd: “not your keys, not your asset”. So DeFi (decentralized finance) is a very trendy thing.
And CeFi (centralized finance) is what your grandparents could do because they're afraid of losing their keys. CeFi got a bad name this year because of Sam Bankman Fried and colleagues. Those platforms were all centralized finance, because they held your keys for you.
We launched CeFiWire.com right after that, and we get some people poking fun of us, that we're CeFi and not DeFi. But I think your grandparents are probably right, I'm going to lose my keys if I try to hold my keys. And there are things that financial services firms provide that you can't get peer to peer. So from our vision, at least for the foreseeable future, there are going to be financial services firms involved with how you use these blockchain-enabled assets and investing strategies and more.
Most people are not going to go it alone. 401(k)’s offer a similar example – alongside target date funds, many offer brokerage windows with full flexibility. But less than 5% of assets are in brokerage accounts. And I think it's fewer than 1% of participants. Most people don’t want to go it alone. CeFi is the equivalent in the digital asset world.
DEFI FOR DUMMIES (IT’S ME, NOT YOU).
Lisa Massena
You believe one of the reasons people should pay attention to this space is there's a lot happening quickly, that's going to be very disruptive and provide new opportunities.
Let's start with the example of the key, which in a Low-Fi world I'm going to call it my password. In this world I need to get onto a bunch of financial accounts, and into other places. And the financial account providers want me to be able to get online to do the things that are important, and have a relationship with me, to share information and help me do things more effectively. But they're also worried about fraud. So they, they want to make sure no other bad actor gets on the system pretending to be me.
The world is evolving so quickly; I heard in a room yesterday that for all of us, all of our information is already on the dark web. And that using my mother's maiden name might not be an effective way of cloaking myself. Let's talk about some of the things that are coming down the pike from the standpoint of getting access to financial services in a secure way.
Sean Hanna
I think what you're talking about is identity. There are three things currently on CeFiWire that connect to this space.
One, the financial services firms working in this space have identified identity as a key to their long term success. In the US we have regulations that require firms to know their customer, and they have to prevent bad actors from trading assets on their platforms. So they really need to know who they are, and who you are, to do that.
Two, firms want to be able to give you things like advice or to track their relationships, so they want to know who you are. By the way, there are probably times when you don't want them to know who you are. A big recent trend is privacy concerns. Related to this, the hot topic right now is a thing called “zero knowledge proofs”. ZKPs are a mathematical way to show a third party that you are who you claim to be, without the third party knowing information about you that you don't want them to know.
Lisa Massena
So for example, it might be perfectly fine for my employer to know and share information about how much I have in my 401(k) plan. But I certainly might not want my employer to know what level of debt I have. And therefore, I might be uncomfortable getting financial advice through my employer that includes that information,
Sean Hanna
Yes. Here’s another example. JPMorgan Chase, which is one of the tech leaders on the financial services side, bought an innovation lab, a company that doing a lot of research in this area.
Their explicit goal is to create a universal ID that will satisfy these requirements that proves that you are you to JPMorgan Chase. The universal ID proves whether or not you're an American citizen for the SEC purposes; that you are qualified to buy the investments you're buying through JPMorgan Chase. And that if you're banking with them, or depositing or moving money, that you're not a bad actor. One goal is to satisfy the new anti money laundering requirements that they have. At the same time, they want to let the customer not reveal more than that customer needs to reveal. Because they feel that people won't use the service fully if that happens.
And this is called a “soul bound token”. Because this token ties to your identity, and only yours. A big debate now is whether this is something that governments should issue, like Social Security numbers are in the US. A lot of people don't like this idea because, one, this technology is global. So if you're the US government, you may not like a soul bound token issued by Moscow right now.
A.so, a lot of people in the developing technology arena don't trust Washington. So they probably don't want Washington to issue the soul bound token. So who this is going to be issued by -- what's going to be accepted -- is very much up in the air right now. It probably won't be in five years.
Looking forward, if an SBT becomes a universal identifier, it's going to have to be adopted into 401(k) plans by the plan sponsor. And there are a lot of related implications for how other platforms tie in.
For example, if you're going to try to give advice to people, it's better to give them wholistic advice. And if soul bound tokens are used inside and outside of retirement plans, that may be a way to easily bring together a lot of your other information that are useful to lifetime financial planning. For example, your doctor's records may be attached to your SBT, along with records on your other financial assets, real estate you own around the world, all sorts of things.
For an adviser to be most useful, it can be easy for them to pull that all together If it's all been tokenized. One of the advantages of blockchain rails is they're indifferent to what kind of information is behind the token. So you can tokenize securities, you can tokenize assets, I've met a company that's tokenizing aged scotch. So your adviser can know exactly what your liquid portfolio actually is made up of (pun intended?). Deeds, housing, your car. In California, they're starting to tokenize your car title. So that can be read on the blockchain.
The soul bound token can link all of those assets together. It also has a unique feature in that the related data very clearly will be owned by whoever owns the soul bound token. This connects to recent debates about who “owns” and can manage, have access to, use, or share data currently.
Image that you want to buy a financial plan. And you don't want an ongoing relationship. You can turn your data on, the advisor would use AI or whatever they use in five years for your financial plan. And you can turn the data off again once you have the plan.
TAKE MY EYEBALLS, PLEASE.
Lisa Massena
Keeping it simple on my behalf. A soul bound token is anti fraud and provides the ability to identify me even when perhaps I have forgotten my password “again”.
Sean Hanna
Yes. Going one further -- I don't think this is actually going to be what happens, but an example of how fast the innovation is occurring – but consider this. The founder of OpenAI, the company that's behind ChatGPT, has created another company, Worldcoin. They are working on both a decentralized World ID, and on a worldcoin token that they intend to be a soul bound token.
Along the way they've created a little tool for retina scanning in support of the ID. To get one, you go into a cafe or the like where they have the tool set up. You scan your eyeball and it takes a retina scan, and then it builds a token, which it then stores for you as a universal ID.
And that would be an example of you down the road so it keeps the record that you are Lisa Massena or I'm Sean Hanna and this is my retina scan. So down the road you'll be able to show somebody the retina scan and they will connect to the world token, which will then verify the information about you. If somebody wants to know that you're an American citizen, you would scan your retina and the token will say Yes this person is an American citizen, but it won't say that you're Lisa Massena or give away other information you elect not to share. The token allows you to prove whatever you want and hide whatever you don't want to show, or anything that’s not necessary for the application to expose.
Lisa Massena
(brain spinning)
Sean Hanna
So your stockbroker may want to know: are you an accredited investor eligible to buy into this fund? You can have the information stored with your soul bound token and you can then prove that you're an accredited investor without disclosing your other personal financial information to that advisor.
TREASURY AND THE SEC: NOT ON MY WATCH YOU DON’T.
Lisa Massena
Looking forward, some elements of oncoming change sound like they're going to be pretty disruptive to the US retirement savings system. We talked recently about what is and isn’t happening in the US as compared to other countries.
Sean Hanna
So we have good news on CeFiwire this past week. It's official. Aberdeen has launched a money market fund in Europe using Blockchain technology. Franklin Templeton has their own money market fund for US investors. With the Aberdeen one, I think you're going to see a lot of other European fund firms opening things fairly quickly. There's progress there.
It's been slowed down in the US because the SEC and other regulators don't really appreciate the technology or the change it will bring, whereas the EU and British regulators see it as an opportunity to shake the box on who's dominant globally in asset management.
Lisa Massena
Yes, I am hearing in the US, we're worried we can't control it. We're concerned that if things go quickly in the direction they've started to go, that we're not going to be able to enforce the laws that we already have today.
Sean Hanna
Right. The US is currently the world reserve currency. For this reason the Secretary of the Treasury sees her role as very special. And I think they're afraid that they would be losing a lot of levers they use to control things like monetary policy, and secure banking.
The Silicon Valley Bank debacle is probably going to help because it showed how fast the internet can cause runs. And when you actually tokenize these assets, they can move even more quickly. Supposedly at Silicon Valley Bank, $100 billion of their assets had been withdrawn. But only about $40 billion had been successfully wired, because it currently takes a number of days to go through the federal wire service, and that slowed the run on the bank.
If you were able to move money atomically, which is instantaneously, you would have seen the whole asset base of Silicon Valley being moved at 9:01am that day.
I think the people in Washington are very frightened of the implications of that.
So they're looking at it from a very Washington centric perspective. One of the things about this technology, though, is that as it gets adopted you can't really put it back in the bottle. It's going to spread. So it will be coming to us. And I think even the regulators in Washington know that, but they're trying to buy as much time as they can to figure out what they're going to do.
On the other hand, things are moving very fast to the rest of the world. In Australia’s superannuation world, one of the US-based recordkeepers providing services there is rolling out a blockchain-based platform. So we're hearing that a number of companies in the US market are looking at the same technology to shake up the recordkeeping market here.
Lisa Massena
So US based global providers are finding the markets in which they can experiment with the technology needed to carry the industry forward, basically.
Sean Hanna
Right, and they can't do it here right now. But I think when that switch is flipped by regulators that you're going to see things happen very quickly. So watching what's happening in the rest of the world will give you some clues as to what's coming.
WE ARE READY FOR THE GOOD NEWS, PLEASE.
Lisa Massena
We have a nice long history of bank runs in this country. And that's one of the downsides. What are some of the positive sides of atomic transactions and the like?
Sean Hanna
Here’s one. Right now if you want to change your record keeper, it is a painful, long, drawn-out conversion process. In the future if the assets are on blockchain rails and the recordkeeping is compliant with that, the benefit is that the blockchain rails can easily talk. So in theory, you'd be able to move very easily from platform to platform as a plan sponsor.
People describe the way blockchain works as kind of like Legos that you can stack together. I would expect that the marketplace will drive the different components of recordkeeping to be put on different chains or pieces of chains.
If you think about it this way, your soul bound token has all of your address and personal information. And your assets have their tokenized information. Then “who owns which assets” is a different block, and you can plug that block in and tie your address block to the “which assets you own” block. If I'm the plan sponsor, and don't like the recordkeeping block, I just swap it out and everything else can stay in place unchanged.
Lisa Massena
Thank you for using the Lego example because that's the level on which I'm operating here.
Sean Hanna
I'm hearing that from my sources on CeFiWire. they've gotten very good at explaining this stuff. But you can think of the recordkeeping as one Lego and you swap that out, you don't need to liquidate your portfolio or move it. In fact you don’t need to change anything, because the assets can be associated directly to the plan trust not through the record keeper, but through blockchain.
Lisa Massena
Yeah. So I'm thinking about all the people today who are dedicated to doing so much work inside these large financial organizations to keep assets safe, to make sure the records are correct and accurate, and to process transactions as they're happening. Candidly, when there are conversions and deconversions, that's typically a multi-month activity. It takes a lot of people a lot of very focused time to either bring a plan on or take a plan off.
Sean Hanna
In theory, that work will mostly go away in a blockchain world.
Lisa Massena
I think I just heard some cheers of celebration from friends who still work in this space.
Sean Hanna
I'm one of those people that believes innovation opens more doors than it closes. There are things that I've heard you can do with this kind of technology that you can't do with technology today.
But when the internet and the web came out, people weren't thinking about walking around with their smartphones. And there's all sorts of things you're doing with a smartphone, because it's web enabled, and that you couldn't do in 1995. And you didn't see coming when Netscape first came out.
I think a lot of the changes that we're going to see over the next 10 years are things that will be changes, building upon changes, building upon changes, so they're unknowable today.
Think about your retirement assets. On an individual level, if the assets that you have are tied through your plan and your soul bound token, you as a saver can move those assets much more seamlessly, and control them more easily. When you leave an employer, it will be much simpler in theory to move to an IRA. And those asset tokens could have as part of their information forever, that they were originally in a 401(k) plan. So the government could let you roll them back into another 401(k). You don't need to have all the proof of custody that you would have today. That is, if the DOL accepts the technology, which is the question.
JUST DO IT? OUR WAY, THOUGH.
Lisa Massena
That is, currently, a key future question. Turning in a slightly different direction, do you think there is an opportunity as these tools are being built out to influence the capabilities in ways that are going to increase coverage, access, use, and outcomes?
Sean Hanna
Yeah, coming from DCIIA’s Public Policy Forum last week maybe affects what I'm going to say here. When you have big change like this, there's going to have to be rewriting, a kind of resetting of the stage, because the technology is going to enable things that we can't envision, to happen.
That's probably the best time to be implementing a vision for what things should look like. It's much easier to do that before the rules are made. We have a number of years before we start to see the full effects of this technology in a way that will really force the DOL and Washington to change the rules. So this is the time to brainstorm and get the industry together as to where we want to be, and what would the best system look like so that when we're rewriting these rules and building this technology, we're moving in the right direction, rather than being reactive.
I think there's a thought leadership moment right now where people can sit down and say, what are all the possibilities this technology brings? How does that get us closer to the goals that we have? How do you make the system more universal, and make sure that we get the regulations in place ahead of time to enable the innovation towards those goals. At this moment you're seeing in financial services that current regulation is hindering all of these opportunities. So that's not the best of all worlds.
Lisa Massena
Yeah. I'm imagining that world. So I liked your analogy of the early internet. And what happened when we connected our phones to the internet.
And then with that phone, we're talking about tax advantaged savings or a better wordset that people really relate to. Everyone's got an account or a set of accounts, and it's very easy for them to work with those accounts, regardless of where their income is being earned. It may be coming from gig work and platform pay. Or you're with an employer that doesn't have a retirement savings plan, and you're in a state Auto IRA program. Or you're at an employer that does have a retirement savings plan and you are collecting assets there in your 401(k). In this future world your consolidated assets are made more readily available to you, you control them, you've got tools around them that help you understand where you are relative to goals, both longer term and near term.
Sean Hanna
You're going to have an AI assistant on your phone, right? It's going to be watching what you're doing and saying, “No, Lisa, that's not a good investment”.
Lisa Massena
As in, “No, not another coffee today, what are you doing at Dutch Bros again.”
Sean Hanna
You know, you're not going to be carrying cash, you're probably not going to be carrying credit cards. Already younger people just Venmo each other. And Microsoft has said they're building a blockchain wallet into your browser. There's actually an Android phone available now that has a crypto wallet built into the phone.
So as your traditional assets are tokenized, you're spending money that way, you're getting paid that way. You're contributing to your 401(k) or IRA and it all comes through your phone or the digital wallet where you're getting paid. A piece is automatically going to whatever savings you have.
How that will all fit together is a huge opportunity for people that want to get advice on the spot. The bot might say – I see you just got paid Lisa. You’re allowed to put $x thousand more in your 401(k) this year. I see your upcoming bills. You don't need all that money. Do you want to fully fund your 401(k) now, we have the opportunity to do that today.
A FASTER FUTURE, WHERE MORE GOES RIGHT THE FIRST TIME.
Lisa Massena
Yes, I'm ready for that! I like that.
In this conversation, I'm going to tag Karen Andres, at the Aspen Institute Retirement Security Program who's very interested in this topic. So we're going to make sure Karen has a chance to see what we've talked about.
There's a lot coming. What haven't we talked about yet today?
Sean Hanna
The 401(k) industry is an interesting one, because it's really a compliance industry. It's created by ERISA and the tax code. And the thing that makes a plan a plan is that it's tax code compliant, right.
You have to follow rules to keep the plan from being disqualified, and there's a lot of work around that. So one of the things that's coming is the ability, with tokenized assets, to build rules around them using a thing called smart contracts.
There’s an English company called Tokeny that's building some of this. And they let you build compliance code right into the token. Actually a law firm has a token that's doing it too -- DLA Piper has TOKO. Why is a law firm building a token? The point was that their clients will have legal issues. So these tokens can build all of your compliance and rules into the actual token. So people can't do things with them that are not allowed. That can actually change a lot of how the industry operates down the road. So a lot of the compliance work is done in real time, you can just build it into the assets and the plans know that the rules will be followed.
Lisa Massena
Interesting. One of the early conversations around MEPs was the risk of the bad apple disqualifying the entire plan.
Sean Hanna
So in a blockchain plan, you could immediately kick that bad apple out, and it wouldn't have affected any of the other parts of multiemployer plan. And the DOL could go in, if they wanted to audit a plan, and in theory, they could say “Audit this Plan, AI” -- everything's on the blockchain and done instantaneously. In fact, the DOL would be able to answer any questions they have about the plan in real time without requesting an audit.
One of the ideas I heard from somebody in the 401(k) industry is this. Right now everyone has to to file a 5500, which is designed to create flags for DOL to start audits, but it's really cumbersome. People don't like to file it, the data in 5500’s is very incomplete. And it's not that helpful to the DOL. One way to get plans to be tokenized that somebody thought of is that the DOL says you have the option of creating a plan token that contains the right information for us to examine it, instead of filing form 5500 every year.
Lisa Massena
I could see that being an interesting incentive with the flip side of it being that if you're doing anything wrong, the DOL is going to know right away. We love our DOL that would just let you know. Maybe there would be a kinder gentler DOL that would just let you know, “Hey, you appear to be making a mistake in this area. Would you like to correct it.”
Sean Hanna
Yes, you bring up a good point. If they can head things off as they're happening. It means they don't need all the same sticks because they can let you know in real time: “Hey, you are deviating and you need to get back on the path now.”
Lisa Massena
That's a hopeful note. Let's end there.
We hope you enjoyed our far-ranging conversation about the future of retirement savings, blockchain, and tokenization.
If you’d like to talk further with Sean Hanna or connect with him about one of the InvestmentWires publications (CeFiWire, anyone?), you can reach Sean here.
This piece was featured in the June 15, 2023, edition of Retirement Security Matters. For more fresh thinking on retirement savings innovation, check out the newsletter here
