Several years ago I worked for a company which outsourced management of their 401k to Human Interest. It was… not a positive experience. I don’t remember all the details—I’ve worked pretty hard to forget them since they were so unpleasant—but suffice it to say that it was my impression that they weren’t terribly good at any aspect of the work they needed to do as a company, and I ran into their rough edges over, and over, and over throughout the time I worked for that company.
Well, I started a new job a few weeks ago, and I was dismayed to learn that they, too, use Human Interest to manage their 401k, and things haven’t improved.
Here are some of the problems I’ve experienced:
Their website is slow
For example, after you enter and submit your email address on the login screen, it takes several seconds before you are prompted for your password. I honestly don’t understand why there are so many companies building websites who don’t understand the absurdly simple, straightforward idea that if anything the user clicks takes more than a fraction of a second to respond, you’re not doing your job properly. This is known, and there are known solutions. Optimize your fucking websites, people.
User interface issues
Because I have used Human Interest with a previous employer, I see this screen every time I log in, after entering my username and password:
I am never, ever, ever again going to select the second company on this list, but I’m still going to be forced to make this selection every single time I log in, forever. This is incredibly dumb.
Because I am not currently investing any of my money in stocks or U.S. bonds (you can guess why!), when I was asked to set up the allocations for my new 401k, I chose custom portfolio and allocated all of it to a money market account. However, after specifying my custom allocations and clicking Next, the screen that I was returned to did not display the custom allocations I’d just entered. I tried it again, same result. However, when I logged into the site from a different browser, started the enrollment process over again, and got to that screen, my custom allocations were displayed. Unbelievable.
No support for trust beneficiaries
The site does not support specifying a trust as a contingent beneficiary, even though that is a very common thing that people who engage in any sort of financial planning do.
Two-factor authentication problems
The only kind of two-factor authentication that the site supports is SMS. It is simply unacceptable for any site to support only SMS 2FA nowadays. More secure 2FA mechanisms are table-stakes.
In addition to their two-factor authentication mechanism being insufficiently secure, there’s a bigger problem: enabling 2FA doesn’t work:
- I enter my phone number and submit it.
- The site sends me a text message with a code in it.
- I enter the code into the text field provided for that purpose and click the button to submit it.
- Nothing happens.
- About ten seconds later I click the button again and it tells me there was an error and I should contact Human Interest support.
Behind the scenes, this is the error that the API call the frontend is making is getting back the first time I click the submit button: “Cannot enable 2FA for persons without login account.” This is just a bug in their website. Unbelievable.
These people are clowns.
UPDATE ON THE 2FA PROBLEM: When I logged into this 401k account for the first time, it offered me the choice between either creating an account or logging in with an existing Human Interest account. Since I had an existing account from my previous employer I chose the latter, which seemed to work just fine: it linked my new employer’s 401k to my existing login, which is why I get the prompt shown above every time I log in. Great! This is functionality they built into their site on purpose, so surely it works properly, right? Nope! According to their support team, the part of their site that deals with 2FA doesn’t know how to handle accounts that are linked together like this, even though they’re the one that wrote the code and workflows that link accounts together like this. After explaining that, they offered me a workaround which, of course, didn’t work. So now I’ve told them that and I’m waiting to hear back from them what they’re going to do about it.
2FA UPDATE 2: No thanks to Human Interest, I figured out a partial workaround for this issue. I logged into the website and selected my current 401k account rather than the new one, and from inside that account I was able to enable 2FA successfully. However, even after doing that, when I log out and log back in and select my current 401k account, it continues to display a banner which I can’t make go away asking me to enable 2FA, even though I’ve already done it.
Can’t configure backup email address
Here’s another bug on their site related to having multiple employer accounts: I am unable to configure a backup email address on my account. When I attempt to do so it says an error occurred, and when I look in the developer console I see the error being returned by their API (but not being displayed to the user in the browser!) is, “The primary email address you’ve entered is registered to another account. Please confirm that you’ve entered it correctly.”
They’ve lost some of my money
Lest you think that these people’s problems are only in the realm of their website, let me disabuse you of that notion by telling you that the first matching deposit my employer sent to Human Interest for my benefit has disappeared into the ether, i.e., it has not been deposited into my 401k account. This is now well and truly into “You had one job” territory: the one thing a company managing investment accounts absolutely needs to get right is accounting for all of the money properly, and Human Interest can’t do that either.
Full Disclosure: The found the missing money after I asked them to look into it. But of course I shouldn’t have had to ask.
