Transamerica marks 25 years of pooled plans as assets reach $34.2 billion

Transamerica says October marks 25 years of running pooled plans, and the figures attached to the anniversary explain the format's staying power: assets have climbed more than 60% in five years, from $21.3 billion in 2021 to $34.2 billion, while the number of employers adopting the options is up almost 40% over the same stretch. A pooled arrangement lets unrelated employers join one professionally managed plan and hand off the fiduciary and administrative work — the whole of the pitch to a small sponsor that wants a benefit standing beside a large company's.

The quarter century runs longer than the SECURE Act, which the firm credits with spurring part of the growth. Transamerica's pooled offerings now include multiple employer plans along with its Group Plan Solution and Retirement Plan Exchange structures, both of which arrived as provisions of the 2019 law, and the release presents the whole of it as one continuous practice running back to 2001; the company describes the result as making it one of the largest providers of pooled plan services, a ranking the announcement does not quantify.

But the anniversary figures measure employers that have already joined, not the wider pool who say they might. Research this year from the Transamerica Institute, the firm's own research organization, found that 48% of employers without a standalone plan of their own said they would consider joining a PEP, a multiple employer plan or another defined contribution arrangement as an alternative. That measures intent, and it was collected by the provider selling the product, but it is the number the sales organization carries into the mid market.

Darren Zino, Transamerica's head of retirement distribution, said in the release that the best pooled plans are built around the problems employers actually bring and that the firm's offerings have kept changing to fit them. Stanley Kim, who leads its pooled plan practice, describes simplicity as the central draw: an employer that outsources setup and administration still offers a benefit it could not build on its own.

Which providers grow from here turns less on plan design than on distribution coverage, since the scarce asset in the pooled market is a field organization that can reach mid-market employers one segment at a time, as this publication has reported — the same contest our September reporting described between Transamerica's two national sales seats and The Standard's $5 billion pooled book.

Two markers will say something about the pace. ASPPA's Qualified Pooled Plan Professional designation, created in August, is the clearest sign so far that the advisory side of the pooled market is being formalized rather than improvised. The other is whether the 48% who tell Transamerica's researchers they would consider a pooled plan ever sign one; five years of asset growth at a single provider does not settle it.