One ranked list, four readers, four different meanings

What you are doing

Win fee-sensitive plans and benchmark the ones you hold.

A row is

plan in review

The action on it

Add to pipeline

Signals, in the order you meet them

1. 1.Fee Renegotiation2.88x lift · 11.5% base · 2/4 gatesPlans whose administrative cost per participant is about to fall, and stay down.
2. 2.Recordkeeper Change3.19x lift · 3.0% base · 2/4 gatesPlans most likely to change recordkeeper next year.
3. 3.Plan Termination Risk2.81x lift · 0.5% base · 1/4 gatesPlans most likely to terminate or merge away next year.

The lift gate misses at 2.88x, but lift is the wrong headline for this signal: at an 11.5% base rate the top decile still hits roughly one in three, far better in absolute terms than either other signal here. The naive fee-percentile sort returns 1.22x against the model's 2.88x, so the mechanical reversion this outcome was designed to survive is not what is driving it. The number to watch is the base rate, which fell 22% between the fit and validation windows — more drift than the other outcomes show, and worth re-checking on the next refresh.

What you are doing

Prospect competitors' books.

A row is

prospect

The action on it

Add to call list

Signals, in the order you meet them

1. 1.Recordkeeper Change3.19x lift · 3.0% base · 2/4 gatesPlans most likely to change recordkeeper next year.
2. 2.Fee Renegotiation2.88x lift · 11.5% base · 2/4 gatesPlans whose administrative cost per participant is about to fall, and stay down.
3. 3.Plan Termination Risk2.81x lift · 0.5% base · 1/4 gatesPlans most likely to terminate or merge away next year.

The absence lift lands between roughly 1.78x and 2.02x across five draws, straddling its own 2.0 gate, so the moat claim can be neither made nor dismissed on this evidence. What is not in doubt is the mechanism: the model leans hardest on prior-year asset-mix movement, which is visible in the same public filings to anyone who reads them. Sell this as a better ranked list with real economics, never as something a competitor cannot build.

What you are doing

Retain the clients you already serve.

A row is

client at risk

The action on it

Flag for outreach

Signals, in the order you meet them

1. 1.Plan Termination Risk2.81x lift · 0.5% base · 1/4 gatesPlans most likely to terminate or merge away next year.
2. 2.Recordkeeper Change3.19x lift · 3.0% base · 2/4 gatesPlans most likely to change recordkeeper next year.
3. 3.Fee Renegotiation2.88x lift · 11.5% base · 2/4 gatesPlans whose administrative cost per participant is about to fall, and stay down.

This signal's headline result is not reproducible enough to call. Across five draws the absence lift lands between roughly 1.87x and 2.07x — it straddles its own 2.0 gate, so neither a pass nor a miss is a finding. At a 0.48% base rate the top decile contains only a few hundred positives, and ordinary floating-point variation moves enough of them to flip the verdict. Treat it as approximately at the threshold, not above it. Separately, mergers are buried inside terminations and cannot currently be separated, so the one sub-case that is an opportunity — a plan someone acquired rather than lost — is not addressable yet.

What you are doing

Buy providers, not plans.

A row is

target

The action on it

Add to pipeline

Signals, in the order you meet them

1. 1.Provider ConsolidationRecordkeepers, TPAs and advisory firms whose book is about to be absorbed.
2. 2.Plan Termination Risk2.81x lift · 0.5% base · 1/4 gatesPlans most likely to terminate or merge away next year.
3. 3.Recordkeeper Change3.19x lift · 3.0% base · 2/4 gatesPlans most likely to change recordkeeper next year.

Backtested at AUC 1.0000, which is a leak rather than a result. The outcome is defined as top_dest_share >= 0.40 while top_dest_share is also a feature, so the model recovered one threshold on its own label and every other feature scored an importance of exactly zero. Two genuine defects were fixed on the way to finding it — a duplicated join producing destination shares above 1.0, and provider EIN consolidation read as eight separate acquisitions — and the outcome series is now plausible at 1.4-5.6% a year. The signal is nonetheless not predictive as specified and is withheld until it is rebuilt to predict year T+1 from information available at year T.