PARTICIPANT SERVICES

We help make it easy for you to manage your participant data and work on your behalf to educate your employees.

PLAN PARTICIPANT MIGRATION EXPERIENCE

Wells Fargo IRT will send the first communication to your retirement plan participants about 30 days prior to the migration. It’ll introduce Principal and announce the retirement account move. The personalized content will provide detailed information on what’s to come for them based on the type of plan and their status whether they’re actively enrolled, not enrolled, or a former participant.

At migration,

here's what your participants can expect:

Thursday evening before migration:

Activity will freeze. 

Participants will only be able to view their retirement plan through Wells Fargo IRT.

The following week: 

Their retirement plan is available on the Principal recordkeeping platform via the Principal participant website.

With the Principal® Real Start participant onboarding experience, we’ll send out a communication to welcome participants to Principal, letting them know their account has moved and is now available to access. We’ll encourage them to go online and/or download our app to secure their account as soon as possible.

For those DC participants who aren’t currently enrolled in the plan, we’ll enter them in our enrollment portion of Principal® Real Start experience encouraging them to enroll.

Here's what your participants can expect:

If participants call the Wells Fargo IRT contact center, representatives will direct participants to call Principal and will provide the applicable Principal phone number.

The Wells Fargo IRT website will have language to direct your participants to the Principal website and the Principal Contact Center with any questions.

The online and mobile app migration experience will be available during their first login for up to 90 days after the move. It’ll show an overview of their elections and account value that moved to Principal including:

  • Contributions
  • Investments
  • Beneficiaries

They’ll be able to do a checkup of their account to easily review the elections and make changes if they’d like.

 

We’ll send your participants a weekly email campaign over the first few months following the plan migration to introduce them to each of the available services and resources.

PARTICIPANT CONTACT CENTER

To ensure we’re available to help your participants when they need it, the Participant Contact Center is available Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. CT, except major U.S. holidays: 800-547-7754.


PLAN PARTICIPANT WEBSITE

Our participant experience will welcome your eligible employees to Principal, inspire them to discover the financial future that they desire, and give them the confidence that they need to help build it step-by-step.

 

Once their account is set up, your participants can access details about their account(s), initiate transactions to manage their retirement savings, and take advantage of educational tools and resources to help with daily finances and to plan for a financially secure retirement via our award-winning participant website1.

Accessing the website

Establishing a password

Accessing the website

Through the migration to Principal, your participants will be guided through a one-time easy, secure account set up to meet our high standards of account security that can help protect them, and you, as a result.

Accessing the website

Establishing a password

Establishing a password

Security and accuracy of your participants’ data is important to you—and to us. Participants will establish a password which is needed to access and secure their personal login at principal.com. Plan participants can establish their password on the Internet or through our interactive voice response system.

 

 

Principal.com: Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.2

800-986-3343: Principal Corporate Contact Center associates are available from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. CT, Monday through Friday or use the IVR.

1 DALBAR’s DC Web Monitor Program, Plan Participant website ranking, as of Dec. 31, 2019 (4Q, 2019). Principal plan participant website was ranked #3 out of more than 30 websites evaluated.

EMPLOYEE ENROLLMENT

Retirement plan participants automatically get simple, personalized communication and education designed to help build confidence and retirement savings with our Principal® Real Start participant onboarding experience.  

 

If Wells Fargo IRT has been contracted in your Service Agreement to calculate your employees’ eligibility for you, Principal will continue to calculate those dates based on information received and your plan document provisions.

 

If you calculate your own employee eligibility dates under your Service Agreement and employees appear on your payroll file without an eligibility date, but Principal receives necessary eligibility indicators (e.g. hours worked, date of hire, etc.), the Principal system will calculate a date, which may be based on a default schedule, based on information received and your plan document provisions. 

 

If you do not provide an eligibility date or necessary eligibility indicators needed to calculate an eligibility date, then a default eligibility date will be entered far enough into the future (such as January 1, 2099) to prevent automatic eligibility services from engaging.  When you provide an actual eligibility date for the participant, we will update the information in our system.  We’ll alert you if any needed information is missing that would prevent us from building the newly eligible employee account.

 

A best practice at Principal is to apply annual automatic increase elections on the same date for any contribution type. For example, the annual increase for an elective deferral and for employee after-tax contributions would process to take effect on the same date. Using the same date helps plan sponsors simplify plan administration and simplifies the participant experience. As participants migrate over to Principal, they will have all their automatic increases defaulted to the elective deferral increase date.

 

If there are any participants in your plan who have different dates for their elective deferral and after-tax automatic increase and who want the increases to happen at another time, they can log into their account or call the participant contact center to make the change; but, they must occur on the same date for all contribution types.

 

Automatic increase elections that is set to a frequency different than annual, will not transfer to Principal.  Additionally, if you've set up elections with different automatic increase dates (months or days), the elections will not migrate. To set up your new election, please log in to principal.com.

 

Eligibility and enrollment materials:

When you use our eligibility electronic notice delivery services, you don't need to distribute eligibility materials, we’ll manage it for you: 

  • Electronic Delivery of Eligibility Notices (standard, no cost): If you provide work email addresses for employees who are "wired at work3," we'll automatically send eligibility notification and deliver the plan's required notices through the welcome website. 
  • Paper Delivery of Eligibility Notices (optional, no cost): We'll email your employees who are "wired at work" and send paper notices to those who aren't. Just let us know you want to use the service. 

But if you ever need the materials, you can quickly get them—right from Enroll & Educate. In just a few clicks, you can email your employees or download materials for eligibility notification or enrollment promotion. 

Our Principal® Real Start participant onboarding experience, allows your newly eligible employees to enroll in less than five minutes. They can also personalize their enrollment with educational resources should they have questions about plan features, such as Roth, automatic increase, or investment options. And, for plans using our Salary Deferral Service, employees can enroll and change contributions ongoing, online, by phone or on the go through the Principal® mobile app.


If employees have additional questions or need help, they have access to our dedicated welcome team via phone, email, and chat.

BENEFICIARY MANAGEMENT

Participants can establish and/or change their beneficiary through the participant website. This will be available for both active and deferred/terminated participants. When submitted, the updates you make are reflected immediately for the participant account. 

PARTICIPANT STATEMENTS

Electronic statements (eStatements) offer secure delivery of retirement account information. Plus, they're available to view, download, and print 24/7. And, participants can customize the information they want to see by:

  • Any date or date range within the last two years 
  • The type of information they want to view and the format

 

Principal will notify participants by email when statements are available online at principal.com. If any emails aren’t successfully delivered, Principal will send you a list of non-deliverables so that you can decide the best approach for an alternative delivery option.  

Statements can be mailed to participant home addresses if the participant has made a paper only election.   
At plan migration, your participants will have two years of historical statements.  
Statements for participants no longer active and in Personal Retirement Account (PRA) status will be mailed to participant home addresses unless the participant has made an electronic election. 

STATEMENT-ON-DEMAND

While participants can easily access their statement via principal.com, you can also access and print participant statements through the plan sponsor secure website. 

ADDRESS CHANGES

In addition to the ability for the participants to update their personal information, such as home address changes, you can manage participant address changes easily through the plan sponsor secure website. 

ROLLOVER CONTRIBUTIONS

Rollovers of funds from qualified sources can be contributed to your plan before the employee meets eligibility requirements if supported by your plan document. Check with your service contact if you have questions about your plan provisions. 

 

Participants can start their rollover anytime online, through the Principal® app, or while enrolling in the plan.