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About the Firm
The featured retirement consulting firm specializes in plan design, vendor selection, and fiduciary oversight. With over seven decades of collective experience, the team focuses on providing world-class benefits and investment education to help participants achieve a fulfilling and dignified retirement.
A legacy firm has a deep understanding of the retirement industry’s inner workings and common pitfalls. When it came time to pick a provider for their own employees, they weren't looking for a typical vendor. As a co-founder of a leading retirement consulting firm, the choice to move his company’s plan from a competitor to Human Interest was driven by a need for a partner that mirrored his own firm's professional standards.
The challenge: Lack of accountability
In the retirement industry, "everything breaks" at some point. For the co-founder, the issue wasn't the occasional technical glitch; it was the lack of service and the culture of defensiveness he encountered with other vendors. Working with his previous provider, he often felt he was navigating a culture of reflexive defensiveness, where the first half of every problem-resolution call was spent with the vendor defending their staff and assigning blame elsewhere.
"I don't want to spend the first half of a call having a vendor defend why it broke," he explains. "It’s not personal; it’s business. I just want to get it fixed."
For a financial professional managing a high volume of deals annually, this lack of accountability was a major roadblock. He needed an environment where he didn’t have to re-introduce himself to a new "round-robin" sales rep every month, and where he could manage his entire book of business without the manual friction of drilling down into every client one by one.
The solution: A partnership grounded in humility
The transition to Human Interest represented a shift toward a more collaborative and humble service model. From the beginning, the co-founder noticed a distinct difference in how Human Interest approached its product and its partners: they "dropped the ego."
Rather than building products in a vacuum, Human Interest brought advisors into the room during the development phase. "With other vendors, they’ll release something and say, 'Isn’t this great?' and you realize there were no advisors in the room when they built it," he notes. "Human Interest comes to me ahead of time and asks, 'Would you even use this?' That makes a huge difference."
This spirit of collaboration extended to the technology itself. The firm used PartnerConnect™, a purpose-built tool for financial advisors, and gained the ability to manage its total book of business from a single aggregate dashboard. This allowed the team to move beyond per-client management and scale their oversight efficiently. Human Interest invested over 50,000 hours in product and engineering direct consultation with dozens of financial advisors to develop PartnerConnect. That’s the kind of partnership the firm was looking for.
Furthermore, the firm found a transparent pricing structure that aligned with its fiduciary mission. By charging administrative fees to the employer rather than "taxing" participants with hidden transaction costs for loans or distributions, the plan remained focused on the core goal: helping employees achieve a dignified retirement.
The impact: A shared culture of ownership
The most significant result of the switch has been the shift from "blame-shifting" to "problem-solving." The firm now operates with a partner that values resolution over defensiveness.
"The team at Human Interest has gotten very good at just owning issues, getting right to problem resolution, and not assigning blame," says the co-founder.
This commitment to results is backed by the Human Interest Customer Experience Guarantee – a first-of-its kind pledge that offers financial compensation if the company doesn’t meet certain metrics.1 It’s a clear signal to advisors that the company stands behind its service. For the firm, the result isn't just a better service or a better software platform; it’s a relationship built on trust. By removing the emotional friction of assigning blame and replacing it with collaborative innovation, Human Interest allows the firm to focus less on administrative headaches and more on providing expert retirement counsel.
Disclosures:
1 See terms and conditions.
The case study is provided for illustrative purposes only and concerns the unique situation of a customer and may not represent the experience, or be applicable, to an individual with similar circumstances. This content does not constitute a recommendation of any product, service, or strategy. Consult an appropriate professional regarding your personal situation prior to making any financial, tax, or legal decision. Human Interest does not provide tax, or legal advice. Past performance or prior success does not guarantee future results.
Human Interest Inc. is an affordable, full-service 401(k) and 403(b) provider that seeks to make it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to assist their employees with investing for retirement. For more information, please visit humaninterest.com.
