Ascensus expects 18 to 20 advisory firms on 401(k) referral platform within a year

Ascensus expects 18 to 20 advisory firms to be live on its workplace-to-wealth referral platform within a year, and the first partner firm is going live now, Dan Morrison told InvestmentNews.

Morrison is president of Retirement at Ascensus. Ascensus unveiled the platform late last month, and InvestmentNews reported the launch in early October. The tool flags participants at job changes, rollovers and retirement and routes them to the adviser already serving their employer's plan; it combines participant data, adviser engagement tools and referral workflows.

Ascensus, based in Dresher, Pennsylvania, administers more than $1.3 trillion in assets for more than 16 million savers. In announcing the program the firm cited Cerulli's U.S. Retirement End-Investor 2025 report, which found that 63% of active 401(k) participants do not have a financial adviser.

In a joint Cerulli and Morningstar study of 338 advisers serving defined contribution plans, 10.2% of wealth clients came from DC plan relationships. Yet 91.2% of those advisers place at least a moderate priority on growing their wealth practice. The research flagged capacity, data and technology gaps as the root causes. Among advisers who do not see wealth growth as a high priority, 37.8% said they lack the time to prospect for wealth clients in their DC plans, the most common reason cited.

Morrison said that last figure matches what he sees. "DC is a great place to go and build a wealth business because you get a sponsor to sign on," he said. "They're hiring you and effectively endorsing you then to provide advice at the plan level." The constraint is scale: "Doing it at scale is difficult, and it takes a massive amount of time and energy."

Advisers rarely know when a participant is about to change jobs or move money for another reason, Morrison said, while recordkeepers hold that information. "Now with advancements in AI, we have more data on behaviors than we've ever had access to in the past," he said. "So we can be a force multiplier effectively to identify those participants, identify that they need help."