Edward Jones to develop retirement plan tool with Aboon and RPAG

Edward Jones' retirement plan business runs across plumbing the firm does not own: about $50 billion in 401(k) assets spread over roughly ten record keepers, which averages to something near $5 billion per record-keeping relationship. For an advisor with a plan client, that means working through a set of portals, reports and service teams the firm does not control, and for a firm whose edge is a national footprint, it means part of the client experience belongs to somebody else.

The answer is a build. Edward Jones has partnered with Aboon, an AI-driven third-party administrator, and Retirement Plan Advisory Group, part of Great Gray Group, to develop an end-to-end retirement plan management tool that will sit inside the advisor workstation. Katherine Roy, a principal in workplace and retirement solutions, puts the scope at the whole workplace plan lifecycle, from prospecting through plan servicing, and says the platform will be record keeper- and TPA-agnostic. The aim the firm states is helping its advisors serve business owners and their employees.

What exists today is narrower than that scope. Edward Jones is in beta with a group of advisors on the prospecting module, who are stress-testing the experience and the data, and Roy expects that module to reach the broader network early next year; the coverage does not say how large the beta group is, or when servicing follows. Aboon's remit widens with the project. The firm already uses it as a digital TPA, and the expanded partnership adds prospecting and plan match and puts additional TPAs on the platform.

That leaves Aboon in two seats at once: one of the two firms building the platform, and a TPA an advisor can already route work through. How an agnostic platform stays neutral while a TPA helps build it is not addressed in the coverage.

The ordering is a statement about where Edward Jones believes the bottleneck sits. The firm has some 20,000 advisors in the U.S. and Canada, and about two-thirds of the U.S. force already carries a group retirement plan client, so the roughly one-third without one is not a rounding error; it is the population a prospecting tool would have to convert.

Roy frames the opportunity from the ground up. “Given our strong footprint in our communities, our advisors are working with local business owners every single day,” she said, adding that many owners Edward Jones could serve “either don't have a plan today or have a smaller workforce.” The smaller-workforce half is the more interesting one. A tool that finds plans for employers with few employees is aimed at the part of the market where standard products fit least well, and where a firm whose advantage is local relationships competes on its strongest ground. That reading is mine. Roy's own claim is narrower, that turning a business spread across record keepers and TPAs into one integrated, streamlined experience tailored to how her advisors work with owners is a differentiator in the market.

Agnosticism is the design choice that matters more than the AI label. A layer sitting across roughly ten record keepers and multiple TPAs makes the platform, rather than the provider, the surface an advisor works from, and the likely consequence is that which record keeper holds a plan matters less to how the day goes. Edward Jones sells that as integration; the structural effect, if the build performs as described, is that the record-keeping relationship stops being the advisor's operating environment.

Aboon chief executive and co-founder Nick Gavronsky calls the software “an AI-native platform that lets advisors find and win retirement plans all in one place,” which describes where the automation is pointed. Finding and winning plans is the front of the funnel, and the prospecting module is the piece in advisors' hands now; the administration that follows is repetitive work an agnostic platform can hand to whichever record keeper or TPA already does it. On the evidence of what is in beta, Edward Jones is applying automation to the part of the lifecycle that spends advisor labor rather than the part that spends processing.

There is a second audience the build may reach for. The stated aim covers employees as well as owners, and a plan relationship puts an advisor in front of a workforce of retirement savers, which suggests the plan platform is also a route into individual client relationships. The coverage does not say whether that is part of the calculation.

The read arrives early next year, when the prospecting module is expected to go live to the full network. With about two-thirds of the U.S. advisor force already carrying a plan client, the number that matters first is how many of the rest write one, and the servicing build behind the prospecting module only matters to advisors who get that far.