As an employer, you may face complex challenges and opportunities with your defined benefit (DB) plan. We understand what’s important to you and can help you meet today’s challenges with our experience in the DB space, managing a breadth of plans across various industries.
We customize strategic investment solutions to ensure that your investment implementation is aligned with your plan’s long-term needs, objectives, and risk tolerance.
Our integrated defined benefit (DB) capabilities include:
Bank of America's solution set for DB plans is enabled by service offerings across three important areas:
Investment consulting
Outsourced CIO Investment management
Institutional trust and custody
Yes, Bank of America is among the industry leaders in OCIO services for defined benefit pension plans.
Bank of America is capable of acting both an investment advisor as an ERISA 3(21) fiduciary and an investment manager as an ERISA 3(38) fiduciary. Within those offerings, Bank of America offers: strategic and tactical investing strategies, liability driven investment (LDI) capabilities, regular portfolio rebalancing, daily funded status monitoring, regular reporting, and robust asset liability modeling. Additionally, Bank of America offers institutional trust and custody and pension payment capabilities.
As a 3(21) fiduciary, Bank of America acts as an investment advisor and will provide asset allocation guidance and manager recommendations—with the plan sponsor retaining decision making responsibility. As a 3(38) fiduciary, Bank of America has discretion over plan investments, will implement investment strategy, and is responsible for the plan’s day-to-day investments.
Yes, Bank of America offers LDI for its defined benefit clients. For large plans, Bank America implements fully-customized LDI to ensure an even tighter match with the liability characteristics. Our Chief Investment Office’s fixed income group includes a team dedicated to building and maintaining customized LDI portfolios. For small plans, ETFs or other comingled funds can be utilized to match the key characteristics of the plan.
Under an OCIO mandate, Bank of America is responsible for providing guidance on the investment strategy for a particular plan and its participants and for implementing the strategy. Investment implementation includes dynamic de-risking, manager selection, and trading/rebalancing. Under and OCIO arrangement, Bank of America is a 3(38) fiduciary.
See how our banking with Bank of America and investing with Merrill can help empower your employees.
1 For plans with over $50 million in assets.
2 As discretionary trustee of your defined benefit pension plan, Bank of America will act as a co-fiduciary for investment management and will manage plan assets consistently with the duties and standards established under ERISA.
