Dive Brief:

• Honest Dollar and ForUsAll, both new compaies, sell individual retirement account benefits to very small employers for a flat monthly fee per employee, according to an article in the New York Times.
• Intended for even the tiniest businesses with only a handful of employees, which rarely offer retirement benefits for their workers, the goal is to bring simplicity and transparency to a market that is often a minefield of hidden fees, reports the Times.
• Small companies greatly trail bigger ones concerning retirement benefits. Only 14% of businesses with 100 or fewer employees sponsor a retirement plan, according to an estimate by the Government Accountability Office.

Dive Insight:

“We challenged ourselves to imagine what an ideal 401(k) looks like for a small business if we rebuilt it from the ground up," Shin Inoue, ForUsAll’s chief executive, told the Times.

For small business owners, who typically have to wear both benefits professional and HR hats, the growth of these types of low-cost retirement plan options is a great addition to benefits packages that need to compete with larger employers in the battle for talent.

According to the Times, Nick Culbertson, the co-founder of Proteus, recently went shopping for a retirement plan for his 10-person company, a health care technology start-up in Baltimore. Working with a local benefits consultant, he picked ForUsAll, largely because it was the most affordable option. Proteus' employees include physicists, data scientists and software engineers, some of whom were reluctant to leave jobs with big companies until the firm had a competitive benefits package in place.