Actuarial and Benefits Administration Consulting Services
Septon Strategies applies rigorous actuarial methodologies to analyze complex retirement plan issues.
Septon Strategies provides you with actionable insights—information and analysis to guide decision-making.
With "big picture" perspective, you make informed strategic decisions about plan options, improvements, innovations and possibilities.
Services
Stress Testing and Contribution Forecasting
Comprehensive financial stress tests are conducted to assess a pension plan's resilience in the face of economic downturns, demographic shifts, and market fluctuations. By simulating adverse scenarios, this helps determine the plan’s ability to meet future obligations and identifies areas of potential risk. Some states now mandate stress testing, and this service ensures that plans meet those requirements. Built around Actuarial Standard of Practice (ASOP) 51, the analysis provides a thorough risk assessment, ensuring potential vulnerabilities are carefully considered and addressed.
Plan Design
Plan Design involves examining, creating, or modifying pension plans to strike a balance between the financial sustainability of the plan and the goal of providing workers with secure and reliable retirement income. This service includes a thorough review of a current plan’s structure—analyzing contribution rates, benefit formulas, and plan funding strategies—to ensure that the design aligns with the organization’s long-term financial goals while meeting employees' needs for predictable and secure retirement income. The objective is to develop a pension plan that is cost-effective yet flexible enough to adapt to changing workforce demographics, economic conditions, and regulatory requirements, ensuring that both the employer and employees are well-served.
Legislative & Policy Analysis
This service involves analyzing existing or proposed pension legislation and policies to assess their financial and actuarial impacts on pension plans. By evaluating how legislative changes could affect the sustainability and cost trajectories of pension plans, stakeholders receive a solid understanding of potential outcomes. The service also includes offering expert testimony in state or local hearings, providing insights to policymakers and stakeholders. Additionally, actuarial opinion letters are prepared to explain the technical details and implications of the analysis, helping to guide informed decision-making.
Actuarial Audit
The Actuarial Audit service offers a detailed, independent review of actuarial valuations, financial reports, fiscal notes, contribution policies, and other pension-related work products. This process involves evaluating the demographic and economic assumptions used in the analysis, ensuring they are appropriate for the plan’s context. The audit also reviews methodologies to verify they align with sound actuarial principles. By providing a comprehensive review of both actuarial and related analyses, this service ensures that pension plans are being managed with accuracy and integrity, offering stakeholders a clear understanding of the financial health and underlying assumptions of their plans.
Benefits Administration Consulting
The Benefits Administration service provides retirement calculation audits, reviews of plan rules, and certification of calculations to ensure accuracy and compliance with plan requirements. Additionally, it includes consulting on the implementation of administration systems, ensuring that these systems produce accurate calculations and align with the operational needs of the plan. The service ensures that retirement plans are administered accurately and efficiently, supporting the overall integrity of the plan.
Expert Testimony
The Expert Testimony service provides professional actuarial opinions in legal or legislative settings, offering authoritative insights on complex retirement plan matters. This service includes the preparation of expert reports and the delivery of testimony in court cases, legislative hearings, and other formal settings where actuarial or administrative expertise is critical. Whether the issue involves pension funding, benefit calculations, actuarial assumptions, or plan design, the testimony helps clarify intricate financial and actuarial details. This service supports decision-makers and stakeholders by presenting clear, data-driven analysis, ensuring that retirement plan issues are well understood and appropriately addressed in legal and legislative forums.