Pontera lets advisors recommend 401(k) trades without executing them

The money in a held-away retirement account has long sat outside an RIA's line of sight. Pontera, the financial technology firm that lets advisors manage those accounts, is adding a non-discretionary advice option to its platform, according to InvestmentNews. The feature, expected to launch next month, produces portfolio recommendations the client carries out through a guided, step-by-step process.

Pontera already has a discretionary model: after a client authorizes, an advisor can execute trades directly. The new workflow leaves the actual trade to the client. Recommendations appear on the client's personal portal, both sides get a real-time notification when a suggested change is ready, and the underlying build includes drift calculation, rebalancing alerts, supervision alerts, and audit trails.

Yoav Zurel, Pontera's chief executive, frames the addition as a simple matter of preference. 'Retirement savers deserve choice in how they receive financial advice,' he said. 'Some want their advisor to implement every portfolio decision. Others want to stay directly involved while benefiting from professional guidance.'

For years the 401(k) has been the account that escapes advisory reach. It is a large asset that never appears on a firm's custodian statement, so the usual options were a rollover pitch or a shrug. Pontera's new workflow is an attempt to make the account serviceable without asking the client to leave the plan behind.

The company says the non-discretionary service carries the same account-level safeguards as the discretionary one. An advisor cannot log directly into a client account, withdraw funds, change beneficiaries, or adjust contribution levels. It is advice-only: a firm can recommend, but never touch the money.

Lisa M. Gomez, a former assistant secretary of labor for employee benefits security who now serves as a strategic advisor to Pontera, puts the launch in access terms. 'Technology should expand access, not limit it,' she said. Washington has spent years contesting the boundaries around retirement-account advice, and that endorsement carries weight.

The rollout extends a year of product additions aimed at the same back-office problem. Last month Pontera introduced a bulk rebalancing tool that lets advisory teams manage shared retirement-plan accounts in a single pass, rather than client by client; the company says the change saves about three hours per plan. That came after a deepened data-sharing arrangement with Orion that feeds held-away account data into Orion's Eclipse trading environment.

Advisors can join a waitlist for the new feature starting Wednesday. The launch arrives while Pontera remains in a public dispute with Fidelity over credential sharing; InvestmentNews has covered the standoff, with Pontera calling Fidelity's policy anticompetitive and Fidelity citing cyber safety. The non-discretionary workflow avoids that fight: it requires no advisor login, only a recommendation feed the client acts on.

For an RIA principal, the appeal is the chance to advise on assets that have never appeared on a custodian statement. The trade-off is behavioral: the client has to execute the recommendation. Guided workflows improve the odds, but a suggestion that depends on a client's click remains a suggestion. The feature will prove itself only if those clicks turn into trades.