Michael Kreps, Principal, Groom Law Group, reviews the provisions of the recently passed SECURE Act, outlines what these latest reforms could mean for the future of retirement plans, and provides a legislative and regulatory outlook for 2020.
Transcript
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Welcome to “The State of Retirement,” a conversation with industry leaders, policymakers, and academic experts shaping the future of retirement. “The State of Retirement” series is produced by the Center for Retirement Initiatives at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. Through its research, education, and communications initiatives, the Center supports and encourages innovative solutions to strengthen the financial wellbeing of individuals and families up to and into retirement. You can learn more about the Center at cri.georgetown.edu.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Welcome to the latest episode of “The State of Retirement.” I’m Angela Antonelli, Executive Director of Georgetown University’s Center for Retirement Initiatives at the McCourt School of Public Policy. We’re delighted to have back Michael Kreps of the Groom Law Group. He’s a highly respected attorney and expert who knows his way around Washington. Having spent several years as a congressional staffer working on retirement and pension issues, Michael will share his thoughts about the state of retirement as we end 2019 and begin 2020. 2019 was a year of great accomplishments, including the passage of the SECURE Act. Michael will tell us more about this new law, its key provisions, and what we can expect from it in 2020 and beyond. And what else we might see in 2020 — it is a major election year here in the United States. Michael’s been a great legal resource to the Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives and if we’re lucky, he’ll keep agreeing to come back each year and give us his predictions.
Let’s talk with Michael Kreps. Michael, thanks for joining us today. Happy new year and welcome back to “The State of Retirement” podcast.
MICHAEL KREPS: Well, thanks for having me, Angela.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: You were our first podcast guest this time last year, and we hope you’re going to keep coming back every January to give us your predictions for the year ahead. But very quickly, can you reintroduce yourself to our listeners with a little bit of your career background and your role today?
MICHAEL KREPS: Sure. Happy to. I am a principal at Groom Law Group, an employee benefits law firm that specializes in health and retirement. I am a principal here and work in our policy area, as well as having the kind of a law practice that focuses on retirement plans, administration, implementation, and governance. And prior to coming back to Groom, I started my career here many years ago, but I took an interlude and went up to the Hill, where I was senior pension counsel for the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor, and Pensions. In that role, I was both majority and minority counsel at different times. I shepherded legislation, negotiated legislation, and held hearings and things like that, but all things touching on ERISA on the Senate side.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: You are a great friend of the Center for Retirement Initiatives and an expert that I’ve come to rely on, and I really appreciate your time. We are now at the beginning of 2020, and I guess I’m not surprised, knowing you, that many of the predictions made by Michael Kreps about reform came true in 2019. It was a good year for making some important steps that I think will improve systems outcomes. And that means helping more people better prepare for retirement. Take a few minutes and give our listeners the highlight reel — an overview of what’s happened in 2019; the new laws and administrative actions that were taken and most notably, as we reached the end of 2019, the passage of the SECURE Act.
MICHAEL KREPS: Sure. I hope you go back and delete your podcast from last year so no one can prove you wrong, but it was certainly a busy year. Congress actually kind of got its stuff together and passed a pretty comprehensive package of retirement reforms that had been sitting around basically in one form or another for close to a decade for some of the provisions, but it cobbled it together and was able, despite the partisan dysfunction and some of the politics here in D.C., to pass a pretty sweeping package of reforms that was due in very large part to the leadership in the House by Richie Neal, who’s the Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and Bobby Scott, who’s the Chair of the Education and Labor Committee — both very committed to retirement security, both very eager to see some bipartisan reforms pass.
MICHAEL KREPS: We can talk a little bit more about SECURE, but it was probably the most-extensive piece of retirement law or legislation, definitely since the Pension Protection Act in 2006 on the administrative side; I think the administration has been pretty quiet. They have had some developments on the retirement front. You can talk about their new rules to enhance electronic delivery and to allow for what they call association retirement plans, but I think retirement has not been a focus for the administration, and so it was welcome news for many people that Congress was able to pass such a sweeping bill.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Let’s take a little bit of a deeper dive into some of what you just mentioned. When it comes to the SECURE Act, it is probably the most sweeping reform that we’ve seen in a decade or more, going back to perhaps the Pension Protection Act of 2006. But when a new law is passed, I don’t think people really understand that it isn’t just turning on a light switch. The provisions all don’t kick in tomorrow. Please explain to folks the steps it’s going to take to fully implement the new SECURE Act. How long is it going to take to implement some of these provisions? What reforms may kick in sooner? Which ones are going to take a little longer to roll out? What factors into all of this?
MICHAEL KREPS: Sure — so, nothing is fast. Passing a bill takes a long time. Implementing takes just as long. We saw [it] with the Pension Protection Act that, like I said, passed in 2006, and it took a number of years for a lot of the provisions to kick in. They had some delayed effective dates and things, but it also took a number of years for the agencies to get activated and provide guidance on some key interpretive issues that were important to plan sponsors and other folks trying to implement the law. You know, I think in the case of the SECURE Act, there are some provisions that are effective as of January 1, 2020, so there are some changes, many of them smaller in nature, but some of the changes are effective immediately. And I think the administration, to the extent it’s able to provide guidance or provide some interpretative, the implementing regulations — we’ll probably get on those provisions first.
MICHAEL KREPS: But I suspect it’s going to take a number of years for the various regulatory projects that play out. And it’s going to take a number of years in many cases for optional provisions; at least for the retirement services industry to fully adopt the changes needed to implement the provisions. You know, the retirement system is heavily dependent on record-keeping, and record-keepers have very complex, very intricate systems, and those are not all that easy to update and change on a whim. They have to expend a material amount of resources. So I would suspect although we’re going to see some provisions kick in fairly quickly and people scramble to get those into place, some of the bigger pieces of the bill are going to take awhile to fully phase in.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: So when you think about what kicks in most immediately, I would assume it’s going to be the tax changes that move more quickly. And then some of the bigger reform issues, whether it be MEPs or lifetime income, are going to take a little bit longer period of time. How would you tier how things are going to roll out — that is, the things that people might be able to take advantage of sooner rather than later?
MICHAEL KREPS: That’s right. So, you got it exactly right. So the tax changes — there are a number of tax-specific changes that kick in immediately. One of those is a package of reforms to what they call the required minimum distribution rules. It’s a set of rules that say that money has to come out of a retirement plan at a [person’s] certain age. They increased that age up to 72. They made some other changes that affect what they call the stretch IRA, which is an estate planning tool. Some of those things are effective right now, but for the bigger pieces of the bill — the ones that deal with MEPs, like you said, what they call pooled employer plans or lifetime income — we‘ve got a probably a year or two of runway.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Let’s turn to MEPs. The DOL finalized the association retirement plan rule or ARPs in 2019. Now we have the SECURE Act, which created pooled employer plans or PEPs. For our listeners, many of you probably know that these are 401(k) defined contribution-type arrangements. Michael, can you explain the differences between MEPS, PEPs, and ARPs, and then how do they fit together? And any thoughts about how the market is going to respond, now that these options are available and will they become attractive options to small businesses and others who have been among the least-likely to offer retirement plans to their workers?
MICHAEL KREPS: Yeah, that latter is a tougher question of MEPs, PEPs ,and ARPs. You know, they’ve certainly made the system a little more confusing for folks to try and figure out what all this stuff means. But you know, the background is that that for many decades, there’s been a segment of the retirement plan space where employers were able to pool their resources to participate in a single retirement plan. And the basic idea was by pooling the resources, they can achieve economies of scale [and] administrative efficiencies, and provide a cheaper plan. And that helps all businesses, but in particular, small businesses. That concept has been of interest to Congress for a number of years. And probably starting in, I would say, the late 2000s, maybe 2007 or –’08, people started to talk about whether or not they could broaden out the types of employers who could participate in a pooled arrangement.
MICHAEL KREPS: Now, the challenge was that ERISA — which folks know is the federal law that governs retirement plans, private sector retirement plans — and it‘s fairly complex and it has a lot of rules and consumer protections that are important, but oftentimes can constrain innovation in unique ways. Because it applies to both health and retirement plans, there was a lot of guidance on the health side that became limiting when it came to providing pooled retirement plans from the Department of Labor. That guidance had tried to crack down on some abuses from what they call MEWAs or multiple employer welfare arrangements, and DOL basically sought to rein in those programs for a variety of reasons, which I won’t get into now. And when they did that, they also reined in multiple employer retirement plans or MEPs. Congress got interested in this and started to put forward legislation to broaden out who could participate.
MICHAEL KREPS: The big limitation from the Department of Labor was that employers who participated in a single plan had to have a relationship to each other that was sufficient, and that typically meant having a relationship in addition to participating in the same retirement plan. And so, you know, some trade associations and co-ops were able to offer MEPs, but a financial services company, for example, had a tough time going at and sponsoring plans and allowing unrelated employers to participate. So Congress put forth a bunch of bills and those kind of sat out there for a while. And then last year, the Department of Labor put out a regulation to try and broaden its own guidance to allow more employers to use MEPs. They rebranded the project — they call them association retirement plans and basically they said they took the existing rules and they tried to stretch them a little bit further and say it is a sufficient relationship between the employers if they‘re in the same geographic region or the same industry.
MICHAEL KREPS: The challenge with that rule, though, [is that] some people will have taken it up. The challenge was that they prohibited financial services companies from sponsoring association retirement plans. And you know, there were a lot of challenges. You were limited to just a region or an industry and that wasn’t always practical. So with the SECURE Act, Congress basically eliminated that relationship requirement and created a new type of plan called a pooled employer plan that basically allows a financial services company, a trade association, or anybody else to sponsor a plan; allows small businesses or other businesses to participate, provided they meet a few conditions — they have to register with the Department of Labor; they have to accept some fiduciary responsibility. But basically the SECURE Act ripped down some of the regulatory and administrative roadblocks to providing pooled employer plans or these open multiple employer plans, as they’re sometimes called.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: So can you help us understand what the distinction is? Is it rebranding that’s going on here, where we have ARPs, PEPs, and MEPs, and we’ve always talked about MEPs. So are we really still talking about MEPs and calling them different things, or are there some differences between ARPs, PEPs, and MEPs and can you help clarify that?
MICHAEL KREPS: So MEPS and ARPs — multiple employer plans — are the traditional name for association retirement plans are just a subset of MEPs; just another type, and it is just a broader definition. So I think of those as basically the same aim, despite the kind of rebranding: PEP — sorry: a completely new type of plan that is inserted into ERISA as a new thing. MEPs still exist and now there are pooled employer plans as well, although functionally, they’re very similar. The basic idea is that multiple employers can participate. There are some additional requirements for PEPs that are not applicable necessarily to MEPS and association retirement plans.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: But that does get to the registration requirements. And some of the other things that you mentioned.
MICHAEL KREPS: It does — it gets to registration requirements and the role of the trustee in a PEP; some very technical issues. But you know, there are a few additional limitations or restrictions on PEPs in some ways. But you know, they’re all kind of getting at the same thing.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Okay. So these are all intended — ARPs, PEPs, and MEPs — to expand coverage and access, right? And we have all these small businesses that don’t offer an employer-sponsored plan. And the idea behind all of this is that this is somehow going to help. Okay. Will it?
MICHAEL KREPS: Yeah, that’s a really good question. We’ll see. I think there were a lot of predictions that allowing MEPs would expand coverage. We’ll see if that actually happens. What it may do, and I think is leaving aside the question of whether it expands coverage, is it may professionalize some smaller plans. And I guess what I mean by, yeah, that is where in a small marketplace, you have a small employer with few resources to really monitor and select plans. Maybe not able to run it as efficiently as we would all like, or they would like; maybe now they can join a pooled employer plan or an association retirement plan and have a professional manage the plan to be in charge. I think we’ll have to do a lot of research over the next few years to see what the true impact was. But you know, that would be my guess — that we just see more-professionalized plans.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Are you seeing anything happening out there in the market now? I’ve been reading about local Chambers [of Commerce] as sponsors, for example, in a couple of different states. What are you seeing or hearing?
MICHAEL KREPS: Sure. There are definitely some trade associations and Chambers of Commerce and things like that, that are looking at sponsoring MEPs or association retirement plans. The pooled employer plan provision of the SECURE Act doesn’t actually go into effect until next year. And so we’ve got kind of a runway until that is effective, but certainly [are] seeing a lot of interest in the marketplace and designing that product and try to make it cost-efficient.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: So if it’s possible to start establishing ARPs now and, as you pointed out, perhaps don’t take effect before next year. How do these work in the market together?
MICHAEL KREPS: It’s a really good question. I think that for folks that construct these products and build these plans and then go and sell them out to small employers, I think the MEPs, PEPs, and ARPs are going to look all pretty similar with fairly similar products. It will just depend on who participates in it, essentially what name it gets. But we’re already seeing people building these products. We‘ve been helping people put them together now for, well, at least a year or two, if not longer, in anticipation of seeing the SECURE Act passing. And I think you’ll start to see some of those come out into the market, at least with respect to PEPs, next year.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: So ARPs are moving a little bit now and, as you point out, people have already been interested in building PEPs in anticipation of the SECURE Act and that’s going to pick up speed, but are we ultimately going to see, essentially, mergers and acquisitions happening here? I mean, are we really going to see consolidation happen, and is that possible?
MICHAEL KREPS: Yeah, I think that is actually the biggest question when we internally discuss it or when I go to talk with friends in industry about this or some of the academics. The question is whether we’re going to see a lot of plan consolidation. No. Are small employers going to gravitate toward this structure? Are financial institutions going to sell this pooled structure, or are there still barriers that prevent kind of efficient take up of it? I don’t know the answer to that. I think some people think this is going to lead to massive consolidation and at the end of the day, we’ll have four PEPs and that’s it. I think that’s probably a little bit of an extreme view, but a lot remains to be seen.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Certainly true. If you’ve been around this town long enough, a new law passes and then you wait to see if there are unintended consequences. So to your point, if there are unintended barriers that have been created, they’ll have to be addressed down the road and adjustments made. And at the end of the day, with the SECURE Act and the creation of PEPs, the objective is to expand coverage, to close the coverage gap. And I was a little bit surprised, because I’ve heard folks who are excited about the passage of the SECURE Act suggest that it’s going to help around 700,000 new retirement savers. But as we all know, there’s somewhere in the order of 30 to 50 million workers who currently don’t have access to an employer-sponsored plan. So we’re talking about 1% of new savers. What’s the likelihood that the SECURE Act will make a significant dent in closing the coverage gap, when you hear a small number like that and the problem is, in fact, so much larger?
MICHAEL KREPS: Sure. That’s a $10,000 question. I think there are basically two big questions in retirement policy. One: Do we need to cover everybody? There’s a school of thought that says, well, not everyone needs access to a retirement plan. Younger people … or transient people who are transient and don’t have full-time employment or part-time workers — maybe they don’t need access. Maybe they’re either low-enough income that Social Security makes up a large-enough percentage of their income in retirement or maybe that they’ve got other sources of income. You know, maybe there’s just a group of people that don’t need to be covered. That’s an open question. You know, I tend to think the more coverage, the better.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: I understand, but doesn’t it also suggest that having other options available is still there? Really important. As you know, the Georgetown University Center for Retirement Initiatives works with the states and we’re excited about the forward momentum in the establishment of these new state-facilitated retirement savings programs. I would suggest that there’s plenty of room out there in the world. That is, the problem is large and there’s the need for a lot of different solutions and plenty of room for that, so when we have ARPs, PEPs, and MEPS that can clearly help address the coverage issue, there still seems to be a role also for the state initiatives.
MICHAEL KREPS: Yeah, for sure. So if the first question is, do we need to cover everybody? The second question is, if so, is it possible to do that without some sort of requirement that everyone participate or at the very least, that every employer give their employees access? That‘s what a lot of the state programs are getting at: Secure Choice or the Savers programs are not giving people automatic access. You know, I think there‘s a robust debate here in D.C. and elsewhere, but we do see a bunch of these state programs like Oregon and California getting off the ground and making some progress to help people save.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: I often get asked about the SECURE Act and what it’s going to mean for expanding coverage. And my response to that is MEPs, PEPs, ARPs — these are all positive developments that can help to expand coverage, and I think they’ll appeal to certain segments of the population, and to certain small businesses, they will be an option. Hopefully, that will get them to provide their workers a way to save for retirement. At the same time, I also do think that the state-facilitated retirement savings plans also will continue to be important. As I said, there’s a big problem and there’s plenty of room for options right now to help address that problem. And so these state programs will help to serve, I think, other parts of the population and small businesses for other reasons that are distinct. At the end of the day, I think it‘s all complementary. They all can contribute in different ways.
I think the bigger question over time, however, which gets to your earlier point, is do we need to cover everyone? And if the answer to that is yes, we do have a patchwork system that exists and we’re continuing to add to that patchwork and its complexity, and is that still desirable or is there going to be something more-significant down the road that more fundamentally addresses the coverage issue?
MICHAEL KREPS: Right. I think that’s the key question. It’s certainly Congress — members of Congress are considering and have introduced legislation to have more-universal private retirement system. Most of that legislation revolves around having a requirement that employers usually have a certain size automatically enroll their employees in a government-facilitated or -required retirement program. There, it comes in a lot of different flavors. Some of them are similar to the state program, some aren’t, but you can kind of see that debate playing out in Congress.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: We can come back to this, but before we do, let’s turn to the other big part of the SECURE Act, which is the lifetime income provisions — helping workers manage their savings once they retire and turn that savings into essentially a monthly paycheck. We’ve already touched on the tax provisions affecting when retirees can start tapping their savings as income. How significant, though, overall, are the latest reforms in the SECURE Act? What are you hearing from plan sponsors, providers, and others, and also perhaps what is still needed that wasn’t addressed by the SECURE Act?
MICHAEL KREPS: So I generally put a bunch of these different provisions into the bucket of encouraging lifetime income. The idea that as we’ve moved from a defined benefit to a defined contribution retirement system, at least for the private sector, that there‘s been a challenge that people bear the risk of outliving their savings. And so members of Congress who did, you can probably guess, skew a little older than the general population — they have a keen interest and understanding of the need for some sort of reliable source of income in retirement. And so there has been a lot of bipartisan interest on encouraging private sector plans to incorporate lifetime income features. The take up I think had generally been less than robust and there have been some larger plans that have incorporated lifetime income features, such as annuity options and things like that. But you know, there wasn’t widespread adoption.
MICHAEL KREPS: As part of the SECURE Act, there are basically three provisions in there that allow or encourage employers to incorporate lifetime income into their plans. The first one is a fiduciary safe harbor for the selection of a lifetime income investment option, so employers had felt that there was a risk to incorporating an annuity into their plan or some other guaranteed product into their plan because they weren’t in the position to evaluate the credit-worthiness of the insurance company. What Congress data did is given them kind of is a check-the-box approach to that. They still have to analyze fees versus services and determine whether the product is prudent, but at least from evaluating the insurance credit worthiness, there’s some relief that’ll be pretty helpful to some employers, and we’ll certainly probably move some off of the fence and get them to incorporate some sort of lifetime income feature into their plans.
MICHAEL KREPS: The second piece was an attempt to reframe how planned participants view their retirement savings. It’s a requirement that on, on our participants annual statement, there needs to be not only your balance in your 401(k) plan, but also an estimate of how much income that balance will produce a retirement. So let me give you an example. It might say, Joe has $100,000 and if he retires at 65 with all kinds of assumptions baked in, he’ll get $100 a month in retirement. That hopefully will help people reframe it — their retirement plan from being kind of a savings vehicle that just is a big lump sum to viewing it more as a source of income as they grow older. And then there are some “cats and dogs” provisions. One of them is a provision that makes it easier for people to keep lifetime income and investments that they’ve selected while they were participating in a plan.
MICHAEL KREPS: In the event the employer decides to no longer offer that investment, I think from an employer perspective, one of the concerns was once we put something in and people start investing in it, we can never get it out of the plan. And that there’s a little bit of fear. There was a little concern about tying their hands and so the provision was geared to help with that together. I do think they’ll have a material impact. You know, when Congress was essentially nudging people toward trying to think of 401(k) plans more like defined benefit plans or at least more like retirement income-generating vehicles, I presume that at least some large employers — this will help them get off the fence; they’ll decide to incorporate it and then maybe it’ll trickle down-market.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: The decumulation phase of the retirement life cycle has been neglected for a long time and the SECURE Act does take some modest steps to help address this, but there’s still a long way to go. So let’s look ahead. The SECURE Act is considered a significant piece of retirement reform legislation. And we usually see something like this happen only once every decade or so. Probably the last time this happened was the Pension Protection Act of 2006. So given this, what does it mean for the prospects of additional reforms in the future? Is Congress going to have any kind of an appetite to address other reform issues? Incremental or broader in scope? For example, addressing what we’ve touched upon in terms of desirability of something at the national level to address universal access.
MICHAEL KREPS: Yeah, I definitely think there’s appetite to do more. The SECURE Act process for passage was probably less than ideal. You know, the bill had been floating around under a different name for a very long time and it passed the Senate Finance Committee in 2016, kind of nothing happened to it. And then the House took it up and the Ways and Means Committee, and came up with a revised version of that bill, added some stuff, deleted some stuff, and passed it through the House. And then that bill got tacked onto a year-end spending bill and the Senate, although they had input and there was a lot there. There were a lot of members in the Senate who were probably less than thrilled with the fact that there wasn’t a full, robust process where they got to offer amendments and make changes and get their own ideas into the bill.
MICHAEL KREPS: I don’t want to say there’s a bad taste in people’s mouths, but there’s definitely some, some maybe some concern that while the SECURE Act is good, their provisions didn’t get a chance to be seen and considered. And so when I talked to folks on the Hill, there is an appetite in both the Senate and the House to do more. But you know, Angela, I think what really drives reform and has historically driven reform are crises in the defined benefit system, and that here, the real driver is that there’s a crisis facing a lot of multi-employer pension plans. These are collectively bargained, jointly administered plans. That’s really going to be where Congress, I think, is going to turn its attention pretty quickly. Their House and Senate bills — there’s a big disagreement between the House and the Senate on how to deal with the problem, and it’s an imminent crisis.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Well, it’s an imminent crisis, but they’ve been trying to solve this imminent crisis now for what, how many years?
MICHAEL KREPS: Yes. So I’ve been a lawyer, at least it’s been a lot, you know — every time we think we fix it, something [happens]; we can’t catch a break. And so it’s challenging because there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people’s benefits at risk and … really, Congress gets it. They’re just not sure exactly how to fix it.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: If the multi-employer pension plan issue needs to be addressed, and if I’m understanding you correctly, what you’re essentially saying is that retirement issues will stay in the policy sphere [that] Congress may address, and that perhaps leaves open the opportunity for consideration of other proposals that have been introduced. Is that what you’re saying? Is there still the possibility of this opening because of a major retirement-related issue that has yet to be resolved?
MICHAEL KREPS: Of course, between the fact that there are members who have good ideas, at least they think they’re good ideas that they would like to move forward on the defined contribution side, coupled with the fact that they’re eventually going to have to do something on the defined benefit multi-employer side. You know what: I can’t say that at 2020, they’re going to pass something, but there’s going to be a lot of work on retirement over the next year.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: That’s good, and encouraging. There’s still much work to be done. Okay. So can you leave us with your predictions, get out your crystal ball and as you’re talking to me, tell me what you think is going to happen in 2020 from a legislative perspective, from a policy implementation perspective? It is a major election year, so that has a big impact on the ability to get things done. And also your observations in the meantime of what you think perhaps the market’s going to be doing in the meantime. Plan sponsors, providers, employers.
MICHAEL KREPS: Yeah, election years are really, really difficult, and the closer we get to November, the tougher it’s going to get for Congress to legislate. Retirement’s always been a bipartisan area with a lot of consensus. So it’s possible that they can come up with something this year, whether it’s on the multi-employer or on the defined contribution side. But I really see 2020 as restarting the policy development process in Congress, and I guess what I mean by that is the policy ideas usually need a lot of time to germinate and they have to take root in the national dialogue. Most of what was in the SECURE Act has been, like I said at the top, was under discussion in many cases for the better part of a decade and so I‘m sure there are a lot of great ideas and so they’ll use this year to really plant the seeds and see what grows, and hopefully that amounts to something. Maybe not this year, but maybe next year. I think from an industry perspective, this is going to be a busy year of implementation of the SECURE Act, between the already-effective tax rule changes that people are going to have to figure out how to get in compliance with to the longer-term planning around lifetime income and pooled employer plans. There’s just going to be a lot of a product development, a lot of record-keeping challenges [as] a lot of plan sponsors try to make decisions about what to do next.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: Well, it is an exciting time. It’s great to see so many initiatives move forward in 2019, and we have so much to look forward to in 2020. Michael, thank you so much for joining us once again to give us your read of the crystal ball and the prediction for 2020 year — my resident retirement psychic. I appreciate you spending time sharing your thoughts about what’s been accomplished and what the road ahead might look like.
MICHAEL KREPS: Great. Well, thanks for having me. Thanks so much. Have a great day.
ANGELA ANTONELLI: You, too. Take care. Thanks. Thanks for listening and we hope you come back again to hear from another leader, innovator, or influencer for shaping the future of retirement. Until next time, thanks for joining us.