Guideline vs. Human Interest

Guideline is well suited for a comprehensive 401k service to most any business, whether small (10 or fewer employees) or far larger businesses. They can help employees understand how to invest their money and provide options for them. An employee can allow the people at Guideline to invest their money based upon a simple algorithm of conservative/moderate/less moderate risk or the employee can invest as they choose. Guideline is probably not the best suited as far as the type of financial advice one might get from more established investments and financial groups.

Incentivized

Actually you guys serve a lot of variety of clients that we have. So everything from simple clients on your 316 and then you got your 338 platforms to some more of the complex clients that want to carve out their own funds. You guys integrate well with financial advisors if they wish to use that, but a lot of times it's, those aren't necessary if clients want to save money.

• Administrate individual 401(k)
• Understand the contributions accumulated in total and per year
• Understand the percentage of salary being contributed per pay period.

Incentivized

• They sold us very well in the beginning and the original sales rep brought in his manager which also helped answer questions our executives had.
• Ease of use for employees seems great. Walking through as an employee is simple and quick. All electronic paperwork is great.
• Sending reminder emails to sign up for the 401(K) is a great feature that's easy to use. I have used these a lot!

Incentivized

• I feel that the customer support was abysmal - In my experience, we were consistently given conflicting advice and statuses as we closed our account with Guideline. Despite many, many follow-ups attempting to clarify our current status and remaining steps to close the account, Guideline's reps continued to provide, I believe, misleading and inaccurate steps. This cost us thousands and thousands of dollars given Guideline was not able to appropriately pull the funds before closing the account.
• Guideline's integrations - I believe there is clearly a broken pipeline between Guideline and Rippling. In my experience, contributions were not funded as expected when we first opened the account, and when we closed our account, there was no communication between Guideline and Rippling. Guideline continued to expect contributions into perpetuity despite closure of the account
• I feel that Guideline's product itself is just broken in critical places - most importantly, statuses of contributions were reflected incorrectly in the software (Guideline thought funds were transferred, but they were not and Guideline never attempted to pull the funds from our bank). This, combined with the terrible customer support, cost us thousands and thousands of dollars after we closed our account. There are many absolutely critical features that are broken -> to give just one of many examples, it was not possible to update the bank account information and no error message was thrown. I was told that our account ended up in an exceptional state given our last payroll contribution date and account closure, but these seem like very basic things a 401k provider has to get right if there are going to manage people's money.

Incentivized

• Payroll cycles in small business can be a weekly on-cycle evolution which is not automatically recognized.
• The Annual Census verification, and IRS requirement, is cumbersome as a resubmission of data already known.
• Email to new participants can go unaddressed without notification to the company administrator. Better to illicit early follow-up than wait till their emails expire do to participant non-action.

We will drop Human Interest as soon as they rectify their error in withdrawing $3600 in additional fees earlier this year

Well thought out and intuitive user experience for employees and administrators. Educational documentation has been a plus

Incentivized

It's really easy to get, well, first of all, they get enrolled automatically so they get added to the platform automatically. They get removed from the platform automatically and everything is really easy to understand for someone who doesn't have a lot of experience. And that's actually a lot of our employees have never had a retirement benefit before. They don't know anything about it. They really don't understand how it works. There's also a little bit of a fear factor with deducting money from their paycheck to be able to contribute to this. And so how easy it is for them to get it set up and then the information that Human Interest gives them about what the benefit is, how it works, all that, it's great

no issues so far

Easy to navigate

Incentivized

The few questions that we've had have been answered quickly and helpfully. The implementation was a breeze and the onboarding contacts were really helpful. There was some stuff I had to learn about 401(k)s in making the decision to implement Guideline, but the Guideline team was helpful in pointing me in the right direction.

Incentivized

So we had a designated rep and he was fantastic. I don't remember his name at the moment, but he was almost immediately responsive. And you guys also partnered with us for client knowledge webinars and he was great. Great at that too.

super easy to get going

A key insight from our implementation of Human Interest is that early coordination across finance, HR, and leadership is critical. The platform itself is straightforward, but ensuring payroll integration, compliance documentation, and employee education are aligned from the start makes the rollout smoother and increases adoption. Another insight is that employees respond best when given clear, simple communication about how to enroll and the benefits of participation—this minimizes confusion and builds trust in the program. Finally, dedicating time up front to review compliance and reporting features helps avoid issues later and gives leadership confidence in the plan’s long-term stability.

Incentivized

We went with Guideline as it was more affordable than alternatives. I believe this ended up being a terrible mistake. Invest in a stronger 401k partner. Human Interest was the other provider we were considering. I don't know if closing an account would have been as complicated with other providers, but I certainly know the support would have been better and more transparent with a provider like Human Interest

Incentivized

So we had previously been with Empower, which is another 401k. They're substantially larger. Their web platform is very bulky. Their compliance was hard to get information from. We really liked when we talked with Human Interest Implementation Team that we could get pretty much right to the top. I mean, if we wanted to talk to their COO, we could do that and that all of their compliance stuff just seems to be tied in as the compliance director. That's really important to me.

we are only using it for one employee but when we hire more, it will be easy to expand already setup

• Allow small employees to enhance benefit package
• Great recruitment tool for new employees
• Connection with payroll vendor allowed for less manual work

Incentivized

• I think it's a little bit hard for me to say since I have been more of a recommender of these products in my roles. I've been at a lot of early stage companies that we're looking for solutions and I've recommended human interest because I think it's easy for scaling organizations to get in place. I think in a large organization, what I would talk to is very specifically the user experience. I think 401k understanding and most large organizations is a very for, it's something that's forgotten. And what that means is basically we kind of give it to folks, but we don't actually teach them or help them leverage it. And so they're very on their own. I think human interest is so easy to use that you provide a better experience from day one there, let alone from actually really setting it up correctly.