PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Taking aim at the 401(k) industry’s opportunity for much greater transparency, BenchMine, a comparative analytics engine powered by OnlyBoth’s AI innovations, launches a free search tool that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of over 54,000 retirement investment plans in clear English sentences. BenchMine draws on Department of Labor 401(k) data for CY 2021, transforming a complex dataset into easy-to-understand comparisons of each plan’s costs, performance, and other key characteristics.
BenchMine was previously made available to Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association (DCIIA) and Plan Sponsor Institute (PSI) members. Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder and CEO of OnlyBoth, has made the search and analysis of 401(k) data from CY 2021 free and open for everyone, as a resource for plan sponsors, providers, participants, and all stakeholders to deepen their understanding of the options and opportunities at every level of the 401(k) industry.
“Windows are transparent but often require analysis of what's on the other side. Likewise for spreadsheets of data. Anyone can download the DOL’s 401(k) data, but few could understand it without expert analysis,” Valdes-Perez said. “Let’s show how plans perform compared to peers. Enhanced transparency will bring change and expanded options to the 401(k)s that serve America’s tens of millions of employees.”
BenchMine analyzes 2021 Department of Labor 401(k) data made publicly available in late October. Users can search 54,000+ plans that total more than $6.6 trillion in assets. The included plans start at $1 million and are explored computationally for days. Four analytics engines can then quickly generate targeted insights.
- Benchmarking Engine reveals how a plan performs in its asset class, industry, geography, or other characteristics.
- The Comparison Engine provides a side-by-side look at the characteristics and qualities of up to ten plans.
- The Scoring Engine scores a plan based on the discovered benchmarking insights, which then enables a ranking.
- The Discovery Engine lets users do simple data lookups, but also access with richly diverse queries the hundreds of thousands of stored insights.
BenchMine creates and stores benchmarking insights in perfect English, enriched with links to related plans and supporting context.
“People educate, motivate, and persuade best with language, as everyday life shows," Valdes-Perez said. "Automation has been the obstacle, now overcome."
About BenchMine
BenchMine is a public, comparative performance analytics tool powered by OnlyBoth’s AI innovations, which began as National Science Foundation sponsored research at Carnegie Mellon University. Each tool uses four unique engines to address diverse user queries, such as individual benchmarking, multiple comparisons, scoring and discovery search, with the goal of enabling unprecedented transparency and driving improvement. The OnlyBoth technology that powers BenchMine seeks to become the new gold standard in comparative performance analytics.
