Comments on: Advocating for Transparency http://www.brightscope.com/blog/2009/02/27/advocating-for-transparency/ Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:30:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Ryan Alfred http://www.brightscope.com/blog/2009/02/27/advocating-for-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-235 Ryan Alfred Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:27:39 +0000 http://www.brightscope.com/blog/?p=272#comment-235 Pete - I agree with much of what you said. I think that professional independent fiduciaries are a great resource. I also agree that more service providers should take on fiduciary responsibility if they are going to work with retirement plans. However I disagree that transparency doesn't help ordinary citizens. I think that ordinary citizens are the primary benefits of transparency. Transparency helps align a plan sponsor's incentives with their participants/ beneficiaries. I think that there is a groundswell of interest in the transparency movement in financial markets and will be blogging about this more in the future. By the way Pete do you have a blog? Cheers, Ryan Pete -
I agree with much of what you said. I think that professional independent fiduciaries are a great resource. I also agree that more service providers should take on fiduciary responsibility if they are going to work with retirement plans. However I disagree that transparency doesn’t help ordinary citizens. I think that ordinary citizens are the primary benefits of transparency. Transparency helps align a plan sponsor’s incentives with their participants/ beneficiaries. I think that there is a groundswell of interest in the transparency movement in financial markets and will be blogging about this more in the future.

By the way Pete do you have a blog?

Cheers,
Ryan

]]> By: Pete Swisher http://www.brightscope.com/blog/2009/02/27/advocating-for-transparency/comment-page-1/#comment-193 Pete Swisher Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:00:27 +0000 http://www.brightscope.com/blog/?p=272#comment-193 Transparency is important and improving it will make our system better, but transparency doesn't help ordinary citizens and citizen-fiduciaries much; what it does is allow those who know what to look for to find it more easily. The reality is that full transparency in the hands of an amateur fiduciary probably helps very little. Transparency in the hands of professional fiduciaries, on the other hand, might help with the real issue--transformation of the system to where sound, thorough, effective governance is the rule rather than the exception. So transparency regulation and legislation is necessary, but not the answer--there's another, bigger step implied, which is to put the nation's retirement system in the hands of professional fiduciaries. Not in the hands of government (professional plunderers when it comes to big pots of money lying around--The State is the worst financial fiduciary on the planet), but in the hands of independent fiduciaries. Many ways to approach that concept, but Greg Kasten (my boss) has a simple one--require any service provider to a retirement plan to be a fiduciary. Might ruffle some feathers, but a good feather-ruffling might be just the thing. Transparency is important and improving it will make our system better, but transparency doesn’t help ordinary citizens and citizen-fiduciaries much; what it does is allow those who know what to look for to find it more easily. The reality is that full transparency in the hands of an amateur fiduciary probably helps very little. Transparency in the hands of professional fiduciaries, on the other hand, might help with the real issue–transformation of the system to where sound, thorough, effective governance is the rule rather than the exception. So transparency regulation and legislation is necessary, but not the answer–there’s another, bigger step implied, which is to put the nation’s retirement system in the hands of professional fiduciaries. Not in the hands of government (professional plunderers when it comes to big pots of money lying around–The State is the worst financial fiduciary on the planet), but in the hands of independent fiduciaries. Many ways to approach that concept, but Greg Kasten (my boss) has a simple one–require any service provider to a retirement plan to be a fiduciary. Might ruffle some feathers, but a good feather-ruffling might be just the thing.

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