Asteri Collective names Sheri Fitts executive director as founder Ann Slotwinski retires

Asteri Collective's first leadership change since it launched in August 2025 is also its first handoff: Sheri Fitts has been named executive director, succeeding founder Ann Slotwinski, who is retiring from the alliance of independent retirement plan consulting firms. A board subcommittee ran the search, and the appointment, which RCD covered Monday, puts Fitts at the head of an alliance whose members service more than 51,200 retirement plans and 2.2 million participants, with $158 billion in assets under administration.

That scale is what makes Slotwinski's exit a test of whether independent firms keep deferring to a shared front office now that the founder who built it is gone.

Fitts brings more than 30 years in the retirement plan and wealth management industries, along with the consulting firm she founded, Sheri Fitts & Co., and the Sway conference for financial services leaders, which she started. In a Monday LinkedIn post she said she will keep organizing Sway while running Asteri, writing: “Sway grows leaders. The Asteri Collective grows firms.”

Her own description of the job uses the older label for the people Asteri represents: she wrote that she wants to help third-party administrators “step out of the shadows and shine as retirement plan consultants.” What she brings publicly is a leadership and branding profile — she addressed authentic personal branding at PLANADVISER 360 last year — while the collective's stated work runs through technology, cybersecurity, data standardization, operational efficiency and tighter coordination with recordkeepers, advisers, broker/dealers and defined-contribution-investment-only providers. Which of those two calendars she actually keeps will say more than the announcement does.

Slotwinski's statement called building the collective one of the most rewarding chapters of her journey and said Asteri has grown into a community with “a powerful voice and an important role to play” in the industry's future.

The acquisition wave in retirement plan advice has been less about buying books than about buying fiduciary influence over plan menus, and a roll-up gets there by owning the practice, while Asteri's members keep their independence and pool voice instead — a slower mechanism that leans on convening power rather than a balance sheet.

Underneath the announcement runs the industry's handoff problem: Cerulli puts roughly 35% of advisers into retirement inside a decade, and the pipeline is one problem central staffing solves better than individual practices can. Whether an alliance of independent firms can convert a shared front office into succession planning at that scale is unproven. Fitts's first public date is already on the calendar: National TPA Day, which falls on the first business day after the October 15 Form 5500 deadline and was created by her predecessor.