Rone and Cindy Davis
Within just a few minutes of talking, it is easy to understand that starting a company in the midst of a global pandemic in Cindy’s mother’s basement is going to be an awesome success story for Front Nine Administration someday.
Born from years of experience in the investment side of the retirement industry, Rone and Cindy decided it was time to deliver the type of customer-centric service that they believed in and branched out on their own. As the next generation of TPAs, they are technology-focused. They run with a lean tech stack that consists of the G suite, PensionPro, ftwilliam.com, Formstack, and Adobe.
“Plan sponsors have a lot on their minds right now – which makes having the right technology to see what’s going on with their retirement plan at all hours of the day really important,” explains Rone, who leads the sales efforts for Front Nine.
Front Nine Administration is based in Indianapolis but serves clients all over the country. Their focus is helping advisors understand the intricacies of pension administration. Coming from the investment world, they have a canny ability to speak both languages and add value fast. Now, pair this with lightning quick response times and you have a recipe for a new kind of TPA. Cindy, the operational guru and the other half of Front Nine, laments that “most companies are discussing how to adapt; but for ours, we don’t have to adapt — we were born and built for this type of business environment.”
Looking further into the future, Rone sees a few challenges for independent TPAs. The first is competing against the bundled solutions of payroll and benefits providers. The second is getting the government caught up on the changing technological environment that the retirement industry is experiencing (there was unified laughter among the group about the scope of this challenge). The third challenge is fee compression.
But, whatever the future challenges are, Front Nine Administration is confident they can rise above them. “Evolve or die. It’s that simple really. If you are not willing to embrace technological and business change, you won’t be in it very long.”
