Rising plan advisers put guidance ahead of new products

Ask the retirement-plan advisory industry's rising generation what makes them optimistic, and the answer has less to do with the next product on the menu than with a shift in who gets to talk to participants. PLANADVISER's 2025 Emerging Leaders cohort — advisers with three to 15 years in the business — describes a sponsor community that is finally opening the door to guidance, and a set of participants who need someone to cut through the noise.

John Bartlett, director of retirement services at CFS Investment Advisory Services, says plan sponsors who once hesitated to let advisers provide more hand-holding are now pulling him into deeper conversations, including on retirement income products. Gregory Fortier, a financial adviser on the Boston Bay Advisors team of Centinel Financial Group, sees the same participant engagement and a growing need for personalized solutions as they navigate complex decisions; he calls the moment an opportunity "to really make a difference in folks' lives," but wrestles with the industry's favorite personalization tool: "We're still trying to figure out [whether] managed accounts [have] come along far enough where [they're] … impactful in making a decision, versus just increased fees."

That line is the tell of this cohort: the next generation is skeptical that managed-account technology has earned its fee, and it is placing its bets on an older instrument—a professional who can make the message land. Rebekah Curran, a partner and senior retirement plan consultant at Everhart Advisors, has said that one-on-one meetings with a certified financial planner are among the most powerful ways to improve participant outcomes, and Grace Bennett, director of operations and relationship manager of employer financial services at Lebel & Harriman Retirement Advisors, has said that digital tools make retirement planning more accessible, engaging and efficient but cautioned that technology cannot replace advisers. Bennett's formulation—embrace the tool, keep the relationship—captures how this generation talks about AI: a useful instrument, not a substitute.

There is a generation gap visible here. The advisers who built the DC system sold structure—auto-enrollment, auto-escalation, target-date CITs—while the emerging leaders are selling interpretation grounded in the human relationship rather than the recordkeeper's roadmap. That aligns with where the economics are moving: the TDF default wins early, but the next fight is what happens to target-date assets after $250,000, and the emerging leaders are already talking about retirement income in the same breath as guidance.

Fortier's managed-account hesitation is worth pausing on because it cuts against platform vendors' data-driven ambitions: if a generation that came up on auto-solutions cannot see the value in an algorithm's allocation, the managed-account pitch has a problem. The versions that succeed will likely be those that use plan data to tell a participant something they do not already know, leaving behind the target-date fund with a monitoring fee attached. That is a sharper test than "personalization" as a marketing word.

The income theme also runs through the cohort's answers, with Bartlett's clients asking about retirement income products, a topic sponsors once left alone. The last mile of retirement is a spending problem, and the emerging leaders are walking into that conversation at the right time because their advice, more than the product, will determine whether participants make it.

Firms that buy retirement-plan advisories should take note: aggregator math in retirement now prices platform capability over account count, and the capability that matters is the one that moves the conversation with sponsors and participants. The emerging leaders' orientation toward guidance suggests the price is right.

The 2025 cohort has also taken on the job of mentoring the class behind them, telling the 2026 Emerging Leaders that client exposure and networking beat waiting to feel ready. That advice tracks their own experience: they are learning by sitting with participants and sponsors rather than reading a product spec sheet.

None of this means the industry is turning away from technology. The risk runs the other way: that plan sponsors mistake a digital dashboard for advice and conclude they no longer need the person. The emerging leaders' answer is that the person is the point. If they are right, the retirement-plan advisory business will look a lot more like wealth management in ten years, and the adviser who can explain a glidepath will be worth more than the glidepath itself.