Pontera adds a non-discretionary route into held-away 401(k)s

Pontera is adding a second way for advisers to work with held-away 401(k)s, and this time the trades do not happen on their screens. The non-discretionary advice option, unveiled Wednesday, sends portfolio recommendations to a client's personal portal for the saver to act on, InvestmentNews reports.

Pontera's existing discretionary model lets an adviser trade directly after a client grants authorization. The new workflow, expected to launch next month, deliberately departs from that: recommendations are routed to a client's personal portal, real-time notifications go to both the adviser and the saver, and the saver implements the moves through a guided, step-by-step process. Advisers can join a waitlist now.

CEO Yoav Zurel framed the feature as saver choice. "Some want their advisor to implement every portfolio decision," he said. "Others want to stay directly involved while benefiting from professional guidance. Our job is to build the infrastructure that supports both."

The build includes drift calculation, rebalancing-alert infrastructure, supervision alerts and audit trails, the sort of back-office work firms now absorb manually when an outside plan sits inside their advisory scope. Pontera positions the tool as a manual-work reducer.

The release is the latest in a year that has already brought several additions. Last month Pontera launched bulk rebalancing, which lets advisory teams manage shared retirement-plan accounts in a single pass instead of adjusting each client's holdings one at a time; the company says it can save roughly three hours per plan. That release followed a deepened data-sharing arrangement with Orion that feeds held-away account data into Orion's Eclipse trading environment. Pontera is also in a public standoff with Fidelity over credential sharing, which Pontera calls anticompetitive and Fidelity ties to cyber safety, according to InvestmentNews.

Pontera says the non-discretionary offering carries the same account-level guardrails as the discretionary one. Advisers cannot log into client accounts directly, cannot withdraw funds, cannot change beneficiaries, and cannot adjust contribution levels. The feature is aimed at accounts the adviser does not control. Lisa M. Gomez, the former U.S. Department of Labor assistant secretary for employee benefits security and now a strategic advisor to Pontera, put the feature in access terms: "Technology should expand access, not limit it."

Underneath the feature is a behavioral bet. In the discretionary model, the client delegates and the adviser executes. In the new one, the saver has to act on the advice, and the guided interface exists to help clients get from recommendation to execution. Whether savers follow through will determine how much of the promised three-hour saving per plan ever lands on Pontera's bottom line.