Edelman puts a recordkeeper product chief in charge of its workplace-retail handoff

Edelman Financial Engines went to a recordkeeper's product suite to fill the seat that will decide how its workplace and retail advice businesses fit together, announcing Wednesday that Tina Wilson will join as chief retirement officer, a newly created role in which she will lead enterprise retirement plan strategy and pursue growth by combining Edelman's workplace retirement, advisory and comprehensive financial planning services. Wilson brings more than 25 years in retirement, wealth management and investment, most recently as Empower's executive vice president and chief product officer and as CEO of Empower Advisory Group, the recordkeeper's registered investment adviser; she left Empower in the fall of 2025 and, by her own account in a January 23 LinkedIn post, took two months of intentional downtime before landing here.

The appointment arrives attached to a retirement, as Kurt Fauerbach, who has run Edelman's workplace business for 18 years, announced his own departure the same day and will stay on in an advisory capacity through early 2027 in what the company described as a seamless transition. Ralph Haberli, Edelman's chief executive and president, credited Fauerbach with strengthening Edelman's role as a strategic partner to plan sponsors and leaving a foundation for continued growth, and framed Wilson's mandate as serving more workplace savers while creating lifelong advice relationships that extend well beyond retirement planning.

That is the second senior reshuffle in the retirement business in five weeks, following August's appointment of Christian Mango as senior vice president and leader of its retirement advisory practice, hired from the mergers and acquisitions desk at OneDigital. The firm reported more than $336 billion in assets under management as of June 30; RCD's records put its headcount at 1,679 against some 1.5 million accounts, a retail-shaped client base the workplace channel feeds.

Hiring a product executive out of a recordkeeper rather than promoting a plan-adviser hand is the tell. Finding sponsors is not the constraint in this business; carrying the participant relationship from enrollment through the rollover decision and past it is, and packaging that relationship is a product problem before it is a distribution one. The industry grades its own talent pipeline a C, per our September reporting; Edelman's answer was to buy experience from the recordkeeper side of the market. Edelman's own confidence research, covered here this month, found most pre-retirees want to run their own retirement decisions even though 60% cannot say what they own, a gap that surfaces whenever the participant is finally in a room with someone who can explain it. Edelman is betting that room is the plan.

With Fauerbach's transition window running to early 2027, the two halves of the business have roughly a year to prove they are one; the number to watch is whether Edelman starts reporting something shared—plan participants who become planning clients—rather than two sets of assets that happen to sit in the same ledger.