Ascensus Client Receives PLANSPONSOR Magazine’s Plan Sponsor Of The Year Award

March 25, 2011 - PRLog -- Ascensus, a leading retirement plan solutions provider, today announced that its client, Heritage Valley Health Systems, based in Beaver, Pa. won PLANSPONSOR magazine’s 2011 Plan  Sponsor of the Year Award for the Nonprofit/403(b) category.  With more than 4,400 employees located in over 60 locations, Heritage Valley received this recognition based on its high employee participation rate of 82 percent and its above average deferral rate of 5.8 percent.  

The significant success of this program can be directly attributed to the partnership between Heritage Valley, Retirement Resources Investment Corporation, an investment advisory firm based in Peabody, Mass., and Ascensus, the retirement plan recordkeeper.  Collaborating to fulfill the mission to help each Heritage Valley employee achieve a more secure retirement at a reasonable age, the team has developed a program that includes: on-going educational and communications campaigns; generous employer matching based on years of service; ongoing one-on-one, in-person meeting opportunities for the employees with Retirement Resources; and a “VIP” enrollment program that makes it easy and quick to sign up; among others items.

“We applaud Heritage Valley for their dedication to helping to ensure the retirement security of their employees and their shared responsibility approach,” said Kathleen Endres, executive vice president at Ascensus.  “This award is well deserved.  They are not only a very generous contributor to the plan, but their team has built a solid structure around the plan to streamline enrollment and management processes and to make it easy for employees to understand, enroll, make changes, gain more control, and save for their future.”  

“It was a top priority of our board to put emphasis on retirement savings and create opportunities for our employees,” said Laurie Clemens, director of Human Resources at Heritage Valley.  “The expertise that both Ascensus and Retirement Resources provide has taken us to a new level in our retirement plan and helped us change to a culture of retirement savers.  Retirement Resources has built strong personal relationships with our employees over the years and helped educate them on the importance of saving for retirement; while the Ascensus team has provided a robust ERISA component, a flexible and full-featured online platform, as well as excellent client service for our employees.  It has been a real team effort.”

Ms. Clemens’ colleague, Brenda Maravich, manager, Human Resources, added that “We have a generous matching program that increases based on the employee’s years of service with the organization, but it has really been a group effort in building awareness and educating the staff and their managers.  With a group of people working toward the same goal we have been able to achieve great things.”    

“Each of the three organizations brings different strengths and energies into the mix – collectively providing the magic to get the results we’ve been able to achieve,” said Jim Phillips, president of Retirement Resources.  “We worked hard to set the foundation to make retirement savings part of the employee culture and to get every employee enrolled and contributing realistic amounts.  We took advantage of Ascensus’ open architecture platform to build an appealing multi-fund family investment menu with risk-based and age-based portfolios, of which more than 70 percent of the Heritage Valley employees have taken advantage. Despite the economic downturn and have been able to increase the plan assets from $70 million to over $170 million.”

PLANSPONSOR magazine’s annual Awards of Excellence program has been designed to acknowledge those employers that demonstrate leadership in providing a more secure retirement for their workers.  Heritage Valley was recognized at the publication’s annual “Awards of Excellence” event on March 24 in New York City and was featured in its March issue.

About Heritage Valley Health System
Heritage Valley Health System is a progressive community-based healthcare system located in southwestern Pennsylvania.  In partnership with more than 400 physicians and nearly 4,000 employees, the company offers a broad range of medical, surgical and diagnostic services at hospitals and community satellite facilities, and in physician offices.  For more information on the company, visit www.heritagevalley.org.

About Retirement Resources
Founded in 1990, Retirement Resources is a FINRA registered broker dealer and an SEC registered Investment Advisor.  The firm’s specialty is improving success of 401(k), 403(b), Profit Sharing, and other institutional retirement plans.  Retirement Resources is an independent firm accountable directly to its clients.  Headquartered in Peabody, Mass., its two principal executives, Jim Phillips and Patrick McGinn, CFA, bring more than 50 years of specialized experience in investments, retirement plans and employee communications.  For more information, visit www.RetireWithMore.com.

About Ascensus
With more than 30 years of industry experience, Ascensus delivers high-quality solutions for every segment of the retirement plan marketplace. A division of Crump Group, Inc., a leading provider of retirement services and the largest, most diversified wholesale insurance distributor in the U.S., Ascensus services nearly 27,000 defined contribution plans in the micro to large markets and administers over 1.5 million IRAs. Core capabilities include ERISA consulting, compliance support, sales, trust services, multilingual participant education, training and documentation. Solutions are offered with open architecture investment capabilities tailored to the needs of institutional partners, third party administrators, financial advisors, plan sponsors and participants. Learn more at www.ascensus.com.