Founded more than 40 years ago and headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, Slavic401k is a retirement services provider specializing in Pooled Employer Plans (PEPs) and Multiple Employer Plans (MEPs) for the professional employer organization (PEO) industry. Led by CEO and founder John Slavic, the firm has spent decades embracing the complexity of layered plan structures to deliver streamlined retirement solutions to small and midsize businesses across the country.

Operating at the intersection of innovation and retirement, Slavic401k has built a reputation for technology-forward thinking, including its award-winning robo-advisor, Bespoke, which manages nearly $2 billion in assets across 53,000 participants.

Why does retirement recordkeeping need to modernize for an AI-enabled future?

The retirement industry is in the middle of a once-in-a-generation shift. Margins are tightening, participant expectations are climbing, and a new wave of AI-enabled small businesses is reshaping what plan sponsors need from their providers.

For Slavic401k, the challenge wasn't a lack of innovation. The firm had spent decades building sophisticated capabilities on top of its recordkeeping core, including Straight Through Plans 2.0, a tool that can establish a new plan in the Slavic401k system and a customer’s payroll system in just 10 minutes. The challenge was ensuring the underlying platform could keep pace with what comes next: agentic AI, deeper payroll integrations and an entirely new model of small business commerce.

As John puts it, the industry has reached a moment of "punctuated equilibrium," a long period of stability suddenly interrupted by transformative change. After decades of incremental enhancements to legacy recordkeeping technology, Slavic401k needed a modern foundation built for configurability, scalability and rapid innovation, without sacrificing the speed and automation that set the firm apart.

Why did Slavic401k choose the FIS Retirement Platform?

Slavic401k's relationship with FIS spans three decades, beginning with the adoption of the Quantech platform (now FIS® Relius) and growing into a deep, trust-based partnership.

When FIS introduced the FIS® Retirement Platform, Slavic401k saw the next chapter of that partnership. The FIS Retirement Platform’s modern, componentized recordkeeping core, microservice API framework and unified data architecture aligned directly with Slavic401k's road map, particularly its vision of embedding AI agents across its own ecosystem and its customers’ payroll systems.

The decision was reinforced by the people behind the platform. Longtime FIS leaders worked closely with Slavic401k's team to shape the path forward.

How is Slavic401k building AI infrastructure on the FIS Retirement Platform?

The move to the FIS Retirement Platform represents what John describes as Slavic401k's next major reinvention. With FIS, the firm is building an AI infrastructure on top of the FIS Retirement Platform that will support a new generation of digital participants, advisor avatars and embedded payroll integrations.

Slavic401k is already developing two AI personas, ERISA to handle complex plan and regulatory questions in real time through Salesforce, and Little John, an avatar built on 30 years of market commentary and guidance to support participant education. FIS Retirement Platform gives the firm the modular, API-driven foundation needed to bring these capabilities to life and introduce one to two new agents per month into its ecosystem.