Being free to make the decision doesn’t eliminate the responsibility to implement it correctly. A benefit that appears simple when presented to employees may require considerable coordination behind the scenes, particularly when contributions must move from payroll systems to accounts maintained by outside trustees.

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Making a feature visible, however, does not necessarily make it a controlling investment criterion. A fiduciary may have reason to understand how participant-directed or sponsor-directed voting works without allowing the presence or absence of the feature to overwhelm the investment analysis itself.

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That repayment obligation is what makes the argument interesting: if the participant now owes principal and interest to the retirement account, the account may have exchanged one kind of asset for something economically different.

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What participants want may be relevant to the employer’s decision, but that does not necessarily invoke ERISA’s exclusive-purpose requirement.

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That is the other side of the leakage equation. Keeping assets inside a plan may preserve an investment structure that benefits the former employee, but doing so can transfer costs, obligations and risks back to the employer.

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Plan sponsors therefore have reason to distinguish participant education and assistance from commercial opportunity. The harder those activities are for participants to separate, the more important it becomes for fiduciaries to understand where one ends and the other begins.

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None of those tasks necessarily prevents a plan sponsor from making a change, but collectively they can make the decision considerably more complicated than comparing price and service.

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As bundled platforms spread, the recordkeeper’s technology became the environment in which the plan lived. The platform did not merely keep records of decisions made elsewhere; it increasingly determined how those decisions could be implemented and presented.

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