2025 Top Retirement Plan Adviser: Jessica Ballin
This year, PLANADVISER followed up with advisers on the 2025 Top Retirement Plan Advisers listing to get to know them better. These are the responses from Jessica Ballin of 401k Plan Professionals in Edina, Minnesota.
PLANADVISER: What does it take to be a successful retirement plan adviser in 2025?
Ballin: It’s simple: be authentic in your approach and do what you say you’ll do. One of our clients recently provided a reference that said, “what you see is what you get.” We deliver on our promise to serve as a trusted, knowledgeable resource and retirement plan fiduciary. We also know that our role goes far beyond those promises and that we can help employers offer an attractive retirement plan program. However, if a workforce doesn’t understand the benefit or have the knowledge and confidence to utilize it to its greatest potential, it’s meaningless. We realized early on that if employees are living paycheck to paycheck, lack emergency savings or struggle with debt, they’re less likely to adequately save for retirement. That’s why we are firm believers in delivering financial wellness to the workplace. We customize and provide targeted financial education based on our client’s needs and the needs of their employee demographic. This holistic financial approach helps our clients attract and retain talent, improve overall appreciation and understanding of the benefit, and increase participation and savings rates. And because this education model is true to our team’s passion for teaching, it allows us to stay authentic and become a trusted resource to our clients’ C-suite, retirement plan committee and, most importantly, their entire workforce.
PLANADVISER: Has the focus or character of your practice shifted meaningfully over time to respond to evolving client demands, market pressures or the emergence of new technologies?
Ballin: While we have always offered participant one-on-ones direct with our adviser team, we are now able to reach more people through the combination of dedicated virtual one-on-one days for clients and an open “office hours” scheduling mechanism on our website. This virtual approach is designed to provide efficient and easy access for participants meeting with our advisers to get answers to their questions. We also expanded our education model in 2017 to include live and on-demand video education. Our monthly webinar series is for anybody who wants to increase their financial literacy—not just our clients. This focus to provide valuable and timely education—built almost exclusively in-house based on what we hear in our participant one-on-ones and conversations with plan sponsors—has allowed us to meet our clients where they are and reach prospects who seek more from their retirement plan adviser.
Beyond the increased utilization of technology and video in our practice, our industry is also quickly changing due to broad and expansive legislative changes and product and investment evolution. As a member of the National Association of Plan Advisors, our team stays on top of legislative changes by maintaining an active role at the annual DC Fly-In Forum. Attending this forum at the capitol allows us to keep a pulse on congressional initiatives and help promote meaningful legislation to improve retirement savings. We also help our clients improve investment lineups and reduce plan fees by using collective investment trusts and managed investment models.
Most recently, to address the emergence of state mandates for retirement plans, our team—in partnership with Ascensus’s Newport Group—launched the 401k Collective PEP. This pooled employer plan is open to all organizations and is an option for both small and large retirement plans looking to offload many of their fiduciary duties. Signing up for the 401k Collective PEP allows plan sponsors to offer a competitive plan with access to our team’s customized education model, including participant one-on-ones with our financial advisers.
PLANADVISER: What is something that your team learned the hard way about this business?
Ballin: Our team has learned the importance of tracking and measuring all of the services that we provide—and documenting each success story—to remind our clients of the value we add. It is critical that the C-suite understands how many employee education meetings, webinars and one-on-ones we’ve had with their workforce and how it directly impacts tangible plan outcomes like increased engagement, participation and deferral rates. If we do not proactively share results from what’s happening behind the scenes, they may look for a new adviser.
At our annual plan sponsor and fiduciary summit, we always show our top five clients for participant one-on-one engagement. For the 2024 calendar year, our top threehad 150, 132 and 85 participants meet with one of our advisers. Sharing this data in a room full of our clients immediately sparked competitiveness, and one plan sponsor told our team that their goal is to secure the No. 1 spot for their staff engaging with our team of advisers. While unexpected, it is often data points that you already track that can immediately showcase your value to current and prospective clients.
PLANADVISER: For those plan sponsors looking for a new plan adviser, describe what makes your firm stand out.
Ballin: We are unique in several ways. We’re a women-owned business, and all of the advisers on our team are women and working moms. We focus exclusively on corporate retirement plans, combining decades of fiduciary and investment expertise collectively between us. Lastly, we passionately believe in—and invest in—financial education in our clients’ workplace. We do this by staying proactive, continually seeking feedback, listening and adapting to the needs of our clients. Our strength is in our ability to connect to both plan sponsors and retirement plan participants through efficient and diverse channels. We know that everybody learns differently, and each person is starting at a different place on their financial literacy journey.
Do you want to meet in-person or virtually with our adviser? We do that. You can even invite your spouse or a trusted loved one to join the meeting with you.
Do you want a group education session for your staff on-site or via a webinar? We do that, too.
Are you more self-led and autonomous, and want to educate yourself on your own time? We have more than 60 videos for you on our website.
Do you find more success attending a live webinar and having a chance to ask questions? We host monthly webinars for you. We have 14 webinars scheduled for 2025, and 12 webinars are already slated for 2026.
While we prioritize custom education for our clients, we do not stop there. We want to share financial education with anyone seeking it. Our website and YouTube channel offer all of our videos so that anybody can learn and get a sense of our services, who we are and what we have to offer.
Lastly, the numbers speak for themselves. As of Q2 2025, our clients, on average, have an 84% participation rate and 8.4% deferral rate. Our highest participation rate, shared by 22 of our clients, is 100%, and our highest deferral rate is 18.8%—an impressive number shared by two of our clients. Without dedicated and engaged plan sponsors and participants willing to put in the time to understand their retirement benefit, this would not be possible. We are grateful for the work we get to do and look forward to serving our current and future clients for years to come.
View Other Top Retirement Plan Adviser Profiles Here