Transamerica pooled plans reach $34.2 billion, shifting the focus to retirement income

Transamerica's pooled employer plans now hold $34.2 billion, up more than 60% in five years, while its research arm finds 48% of employers without a plan would consider joining one. Twenty-five years after the recordkeeper opened the business, the model has what a retirement vehicle needs before anyone treats it as infrastructure: scale, and a queue of employers waiting to use it.

The mechanics explain the growth: a pooled employer plan lets unrelated employers share one plan document, one Form 5500 and one named fiduciary, so a 40-person firm buys governance and pricing closer to what a much larger sponsor negotiates. The employer keeps the payroll deduction and the match; plan-level obligations move to the pooled provider, and for a business owner with no appetite for chairing an investment committee, that trade is the product.

Transamerica has run pooled arrangements for 25 years by its own count, and $34.2 billion is what accumulates when small employers stop running plans alone. The 48%, though, measures something harder: employers with no plan have been the most difficult segment the retirement industry has tried to reach, because the fixed costs of standing one up fall hardest on the smallest sponsors — recordkeeping minimums, committee meetings, and an audit once the roster grows past the threshold. That arithmetic kept the coverage gap open for a generation; if roughly half of uncovered employers now say they would consider a pooled arrangement, the objection that kept them out is losing its bite.

Enrollment is closer to solved than it has been in years; the unfinished half of the 401(k) is what happens after the balance is built.

Dunham's paper models a $1 million portfolio across a 40-year retirement at a 4% net return and finds the money exhausted in year 34. A horizon that long turns an ordinary drawdown plan into a bet on sequence, inflation and nerve, and nerve is the part that can be measured. Prudential's 2026 Retirement Pulse found 86% of retirees hesitant to spend their savings; among respondents with at least $500,000 in investable assets, 61% were not convinced they could use their money any way they wished, and 70% would rather leave money behind than deplete it.

Put the two findings together and the industry's unfinished business sits squarely on decumulation: the households with the most to spend are the least willing to spend it, and the accounts holding their savings were designed around getting the balance up. A menu that ends at the target-date fund has nothing to say about year 34.

Demand for the fix is not in dispute: in a 2026 retirement survey discussed on a Goldman Sachs Asset Management panel, 83% of respondents said they want guaranteed income, and T. Rowe Price's Wyatt Lee used the same forum to note that private credit is becoming a big piece of annuity holdings. The constraint is supply — a 2025 LIMRA study put fee-based products at about 1% of annuity premiums, even as insurers name the RIA channel their likeliest growth market, and sponsors weigh an income option against a target-date fund participants already understand and rarely ask about.

A pooled plan is an efficient place to close that distance: one committee decision reaches every participating employer at once, which is how a plan-level option becomes a default instead of an election. Whoever controls the pooled menu sets the default for the small-employer cohort, and defaults, more than features, decide what participants end up owning.

That the menu is an imperfect instrument is not news to anyone who builds one: Invesco's Sergio Marcheli told the 401(k) Specialist podcast that many menus have drifted toward growth, and argued for holding both growth and value styles across market capitalizations so participants can follow leadership shifts without timing cycles. Adding a lifetime income sleeve to a menu that is already crowded raises the same construction question the equity lineup does, with higher stakes for anyone who defaults into it.

Outside the plan, the work happens case by case: Halbert Hargrove built one client's income plan on four annuities carried without an additional fee, the kind of bespoke assembly an advisory relationship can support. That route is not available to a participant whose plan offers no income option at all, and the distance between the two is what an in-plan default is meant to travel.

There is a caution on the funding side of the same products: Fitch puts the trailing default rate on U.S. private credit borrowers at a record 6.3%, a figure worth carrying into any discussion about insurers promising income for 30 years. The guarantee and the credit behind it are now one conversation.

Two recent moves suggest the distribution layer is being built ahead of the vehicles. Ascensus launched an advisor referral platform covering more than 16 million plan participants, which places an advice handoff inside the recordkeeping relationship. Edward Jones says it will release an AI-driven workplace retirement plan tool in 2027, the Retirement Plan Management Center, built with Aboon and RPAG, spanning prospecting, recordkeeper analysis and plan servicing, and both assume the participant relationship is worth owning past the payroll deduction.

The advisory economics point the same way: a Cerulli and Morningstar white paper found that 63% of surveyed advisers call leveraging DC plans for wealth prospecting at least a moderate priority. Roll the plan into the household, then serve the household; income is the natural first conversation, and the one most participants have never had with anyone.

Product manufacturing is consolidating to meet the same demand: Nuveen closed its $13 billion deal for Schroders and will keep the unit separate for 12 to 18 months before reorganizing a combined $400 billion private-markets book by asset class. A TIAA-owned manager with that much private-markets capacity has an obvious interest in retirement income vehicles that draw on it, and a pooled plan is a channel where one committee approval carries assets for hundreds of employers.

The backdrop is not calm: Guardian's 2026 Mind, Body, and Wallet report recorded its lowest well-being and financial health readings in 15 years, with 41% of respondents doubting their savings will last and only 13% on track to save for the retirement they want. TIAA's survey of 1,000 adults aged 18 to 65 found 53% fear outliving their savings more than they fear underspending. In Goldman's retirement survey, the share of workers raising their 401(k) savings slipped to 39% from a year earlier, and almost a third of full-time workers said their job only just covers expenses.

Longevity itself is doing some of the pushing: a TIAA study tied AI and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs to retirement funding worries, finding more than 80% of respondents concerned about the cost of longer lives and 43% doubting traditional planning stretches that far. Whatever is driving it, the horizon is stretching past what a drawdown schedule was built to cover.

Policy could re-price the market underneath all of it: three House retirement bills from Scott and DeSaulnier would name rollovers in the fiduciary definition, treat commissions and payments from any source as compensation, and let participants sue as assignees on their plan's behalf. If the compensation language holds, the economics of an income product sold inside a plan change for everyone selling one.

One committee vote is the test: a pooled plan that adds a lifetime income option sets the default for hundreds of employers at once, and Transamerica's $34.2 billion is the base that option would launch onto. The 48% still outside is where the next leg of that growth starts, and whether an income option travels with it is the part the current menu does not answer.