Kathy Connors • Clayton, MO
AXA Advisors, LLC

Kathy Connors has carved out a distinctive, and substantial, professional focus within her practice at AXA Advisors, LLC.

While Connors offers a full range of financial-planning and investment services to prospective clients, she is also devoted to developing fully integrated 401(k) plans for companies and their employees.

Connors, drawing partly upon her years of experience in the education field, recognizes a need for both employers and their plan participants to move to a higher level of 401(k) understanding and implementation.

She says, “My passion is retirement preparedness, and early on I saw something within my deep immersion into retirement issues that I really liked. I think it’s so important to provide the proper financial background, education, and information—and a lot of people don’t get that. Ultimately, we are in the role of disseminating that to individuals, and it can be extremely valuable as their entire life undergoes change: moving into retirement and beyond.”

Connors strives to achieve her vision by working through third-party administrators on “fully compliant and user-friendly” plan designs. This then plays out into what she calls “a comprehensive soup-to-nuts” 401(k) approach involving her, the third-party administrator, the plan sponsor, the plan participants, and fiduciary relationships with money-management firms.

Connors says, “I feel that really gives the plan sponsor and the participants an edge—when they are in custom-designed, unbundled plans. Because then you’ve got every element, representatives of each professional perspective, truly working for the benefit of the plan sponsor and the plan participant.

“We are trying to help companies provide greater education and options to their employees, leading, hopefully, to more fully informed decision-making and utilization of the plans. Employer-sponsored retirement plans remain a key source of retirement income, and they deserve far greater focus than they may often receive. I take my responsibility very seriously as ‘the quarterback’ of the plan.”

For Connors, a key chapter in the playbook involves providing plan participants, as well as her other clients, access to actively managed investment strategies. She says, “It’s outstanding to have tactical money management in a retirement plan. You can sit down with participants and explain to them the purpose of tactical money management: dedicated third-party professional money managers are actively watching all elements of their portfolios and strategies and reacting appropriately as market conditions change.

“Each third-party money manager may have a very different philosophy, strategy, and operating focus.”

“While there is certainly no guarantee of performance, generally speaking, the idea is to use a defensive strategy during bear markets for an asset class and to pursue potential gains during a bull market for any given asset.

“It is extremely comforting for those individuals who are carving out a piece of their hard-earned paycheck that professional, well-screened third-party managers are proactively working on their behalf every day. This is especially true after 2008, when many participants were afraid to open their 401(k) statements or may have given up on equity markets altogether.”

AXA Advisors is a facilitator for this process, says Connors, as they provide very useful tools for risk assessment for clients, as well as access to a wide range of third-party managers.

Connors says, “They’re truly a company that allows their financial professionals to use a robust menu of financial products, services, and strategies. It’s very important to discover what a client’s needs are and what really is the most appropriate and suitable strategy for that specific client. For example, in some of our 401(k) offerings we might have well over 20 investment options.”

And this is where the element of “managing the managers” comes in for Connors, who acts as a servicing financial professional to a number of 401(k) plans.

Connors says, “As one who is committed to active investment management, nothing is more important than the selection and monitoring of third-party managers, and we work closely with them to understand their strategies and how they perform.”

“It’s impressive working within a client’s risk tolerance using very sophisticated managers who have the latest research and technology, and each manager may have a very different philosophy, strategy, and operating focus. However, they all will keep a constant monitor on what is happening on the domestic and international economic, political, and policy fronts—and many other technical factors.

“I like very tactical managers who are not hesitant to make changes as the environment calls for them. Over the past six to eight years, we have had an almost perfect, though painful, laboratory to see how active managers can respond to both a severe bear market and a tremendous bull market recovery. That is something I look at very closely.”

Connors professes to having a bit of a conservative streak when it comes to her own investment philosophy, and she recognizes the difficulty some might have with reconciling tactical management with a fundamentally “conservative” approach.

She says, “It is hard for some clients to understand that active management should be just the opposite of a risky or aggressive investment strategy. In fact, it is all about risk mitigation and taming volatility over a full market cycle. Often, I will help clients introduce it slowly into their portfolios, along with a heavy dose of education.

“The key is to help clients set reasonable goals and then monitor their progress along the way. With tactically managed funds, you can set the expectation that somebody is watching those funds and responding when negative events occur. The expertise of third-party active managers is critical to the creation of very broad risk-managed portfolios.”

Connors concludes: “I am a strategy-oriented financial professional, addressing client needs at any level, whether within the context of a 401(k) plan or outside of that. I see my role as helping people establish their goals and then identify a path toward those goals—and I do that with a high-touch approach and a lot of education. Tactical, risk-managed investing is an integral part of that process.”