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ForUsAll, a retirement technology platform for small businesses, has announced a bold new product: the Alt 401(k), allowing employers to offer retirement plans with access to more non-traditional assets, including the world’s leading decentralized store of value.
The 401(k), a staple in retirement planning since the early 1980s, is an investment instrument that allows people to draw money directly from their paychecks to go toward an investment fund, and employers may match these deposits with their own funds.
“The financial world has changed but the 401(k) has not kept up. We wanted to help average Americans have the same access as institutional and professional investors,” said Jeff Schulte, CEO of ForUsAll.
Recognizing an opportunity to add some democracy back into a staple of Americans’ economic stability, ForUsAll has launched a modern alternative.
“For too long, too many Americans haven’t had the same access to alternative investments that wealthy and professional investors have had,” Schulte added. “Our mission is to provide every American with the tools necessary to build a brighter financial future, and making these alternatives more readily available is a key step towards that.”
He added that the main goal of this program is that “we are democratizing access to what drives wealth for the wealthy,” which includes access to alternative investments including cryptocurrency, and access to personalized financial advisory services.
As a digital retirement advisory business, ForUsAll has recognized a new trend in the American workforce: a shift from all corners — employers and employees, institutional and professional asset managers — toward the new economic world promised by digital assets. They have identified that 36% of professional investors have put cryptocurrency in their portfolios, with untold masses of private smallholders drawn into the economic model as well.
“Once we began looking carefully at the risk/return trade-offs, it became clearer why so many professional investors were incorporating digital assets into their portfolios, so we asked ourselves how we can make this available to the little guy,” Schulte explained. “How do we make this work in a 401(k)?”
To this end, the Alt 401(k) puts digital assets, including bitcoin, at the front and center in their world of alternative investment opportunities.
To make this vision a reality, ForUsAll has entered into a partnership with Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency exchange platform. With its substantial reserves, Coinbase will be holding the custody of all bitcoin and other crypto assets for the product and will provide the infrastructure for all crypto-related transactions.
“When we created our institutional platform, our initial focus was making cryptocurrency accessible to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals,” said Brett Tejpaul, head of institutional coverage at Coinbase. “The next evolution is to broaden our reach and we are thrilled to be working with ForUsAll, a leading 401(k) technology platform, to expand access to cryptocurrency through 401(k)s.”
For employees at businesses where employers have signed on to the Alt 401(k) program, cryptocurrencies will be an option through a self-directed cryptocurrency window. As employees look at their investment portfolio for their regular 401(k)s, this portal allows them to allocate some of their portfolio into cryptocurrency.
This may seem like a baby step for now, but it is important to stress that this is only the beginning for Alt 401(k) by several important metrics. ForUsAll is now the first company to directly integrate this whole multibillion-dollar category into the 401(k), opening the window into new economic opportunities through a venue widely accessible nationwide. Now that this window is cracked open, ForUsAll intends to push it even wider over the coming months, offering both a larger access to the platform and a greater diversity of assets to platform users.
In short, ForUsAll is modernizing the way Americans save for retirement through the Alt 401(k) by shaking up a staid investment model and providing more Americans access to the investments that institutional investors are using.