Conference Topics

We are in the process of building out a comprehensive agenda, and finalizing our line-up of sessions and speakers. We look forward to sharing it soon.

Initial areas of focus:

Cybersecurity for Retirement Professionals

Official CSAM event: Hear about emerging threats and tools to fight fraud
October 28th & first track at this year’s SPARK Forum

  • Current Threats in the Retirement and Financial Industry: This session will focus on the current and emerging threats of the retirement industry (both non-banking and banking), such as ransomware, business email compromise, social engineering, credential stuffing, account take over (ATO), DDOS ransom.
  • Protecting Your Business as a Plan Sponsor: This session focuses on free resources such as security assessments, penetration testing, and how you can best use your limited funds to secure your business. Importance of password management. Understand that findings discovered by GOV agencies can’t be shared “against you.”
  • Protecting Your Employees: This session focuses on steps you can take to protect your participants (employees). This will include both technical and non-technical best practices, such as MFA, biometrics, credit report freezing, account registration, account verification (ACH anti-fraud), and conveying that having more contact info for employees means greater chances of catching fraud early.
  • What Comes Next? Looking Beyond 2020: This session will focus on the technologies and processes that are showing some early success (biometrics and user behavior analysis, identify proofing) as well as potential disrupters (quantum computing, AI, machine learning). Also changes in regulations, such as privacy changes and fiduciary responsibility.

SPARK Forum

Retirement industry’s mega conference for senior leadership, November 4-6

  • “Returning to Work” – how COVID-19 has impacted our workplace environment
  • The future of annuities in retirement: recalibrate retirement plans, with a specific focus on income, to achieve the outcomes American workers deserve
  • Plan sponsor round table discussion
  • Results from DC consulting study: The evolving retirement outcome landscape
  • Post-election Washington update
  • CARES and SECURE Act discussions
  • Operational and advisor-centric discussions
  • Balancing recordkeepers cost challenges and quality customer service
  • Financial wellness in the “new normal”
  • Retirement plan designs in light of the CARES Act