Beneficiary Designation Form
A beneficiary designation form names who receives a retirement or transfer on death account, in what shares, and in what order of priority. The custodian or plan administrator holds the designation on file and administers the account according to it. It is not filed with any regulator.
- Who handles it
- The account owner completes it and the custodian or plan administrator holds it. Advisory operations is usually the party that discovers it is missing, years out of date, or inconsistent with the estate documents in the client's file.
- Filed through
- Custodian
- Applies to
- SEC-registered RIA, State-registered RIA, Broker-dealer, Dually registered
What the form asks for
- The account and registration the designation applies to
- Primary beneficiaries, relationship, and share percentages
- Contingent beneficiaries and their shares
- Per stirpes or per capita election, where the custodian offers it
- Trust or entity beneficiary details
- Spousal consent, where the account type or state calls for it
- Signature and date, plus any witness or notarization the custodian requires
The work behind the filing
Find the accounts with no designation, or a stale one
A missing or outdated beneficiary designation is invisible until the moment it matters most, and at that moment it cannot be fixed. Nobody audits it because the answer lives across several custodian portals and a document store. Caddi can inventory designations across custodians and client files and surface the accounts with none on file, with a former spouse still named, or with shares that do not total 100 percent.
Compare the designation against the estate documents you hold
The trust document in the document store says one thing and the form on file at the custodian says another, and the two are maintained by different people at different times. Caddi can read both and put the disagreement in front of the advisor as a review item rather than a discovery years later.
Drive the update through signature and confirmation
Finding the gap is half the job. The rest is producing the right form for that custodian, getting it signed, submitting it, and confirming the custodian recorded it. That chain is where updates die. Caddi can run it and hold the record of what was changed and when.
Questions
What is a beneficiary designation form?
It is the form that names who receives a retirement or transfer on death account, in what shares, and in what order, including contingent beneficiaries. The custodian or plan administrator keeps it on file and administers the account according to it.
Why do advisers review beneficiary designations separately from estate documents?
Because the custodian administers the account according to the designation it holds, and that document is maintained separately from the client's will or trust. The two can disagree for years without anyone noticing. Which document governs in a specific situation is a question for the client's estate counsel.
Why do beneficiary designations go stale?
Because the trigger is a life event rather than a calendar date. A marriage, a divorce, a birth, or a death changes what the designation should say, and nothing in the firm's systems raises its hand. The form was signed once at account opening and never read again.
Can beneficiary designations be reviewed across custodians at once?
Not natively, which is the problem. Each custodian holds its own designations in its own portal, and the client's estate documents sit in the firm's document store. Assembling one view means gathering from all of those places, which is work an agent can do continuously rather than a project the firm runs once.
Can Caddi handle this paperwork end to end?
Caddi runs the work around it: pulling the client facts out of your CRM, plan, and document systems, producing the populated form, checking it against the client record before it goes out, routing it for signature, and writing the result back into every system that holds the same fact. A person reviews and submits. Caddi is not a custodian or a broker-dealer and does not act as one.
Related forms
The filing is the easy part
Caddi does not file forms. It runs the work around them: pulling the underlying data out of your portfolio, CRM, and document systems, reconciling it against the prior filing, and evidencing delivery. See it run on your own stack.
See the compliance specialistThis page describes what the form is and the work it creates. For requirements, deadlines, and whether any of it applies to your firm, see IRS: Retirement topics, beneficiary.