At a glance
- The Retirement Plan Management Center is designed to carry a plan adviser through prospecting, plan type evaluations, recordkeeper analysis and selection, proposal generation, onboarding, benchmarking, and ongoing servicing.
- Katherine Roy, a principal in Edward Jones's workplace and retirement solutions group, said the firm saw an opportunity to simplify plan management and that combining the three organizations' strengths would help advisers work more efficiently with business owners and their employees.
- RPAG supplies the underlying data: its platform supports more than 120,000 plans and 10 million participants, per the release, which is the depth that suits it to recordkeeper proposal comparisons.
Edward Jones will launch an AI-powered workplace retirement platform in 2027, the firm announced Sept. 30, built with third-party administrator Aboon and Retirement Plan Advisory Group, the Great Gray Group business whose platform supplies advisers with plan data, due diligence, and reporting.
The Retirement Plan Management Center is designed to carry a plan adviser through prospecting, plan type evaluations, recordkeeper analysis and selection, proposal generation, onboarding, benchmarking, and ongoing servicing. The announcement details two components: a centralized prospecting tool that helps advisers find opportunities among businesses whether or not they sponsor a retirement plan, and a dashboard of integrated plan metrics, insights, alerts, and notifications.
Katherine Roy, a principal in Edward Jones's workplace and retirement solutions group, said the firm saw an opportunity to simplify plan management and that combining the three organizations' strengths would help advisers work more efficiently with business owners and their employees. Nick Gavronsky, Aboon's chief executive and co-founder, described Aboon Workplace as an AI-native platform for finding and winning plans in one place, and the release says it is built to support additional third-party administrators, which would widen the field of TPAs an adviser can work with.
Where RPAG's 120,000 plans fit
RPAG supplies the underlying data: its platform supports more than 120,000 plans and 10 million participants, per the release, which is the depth that suits it to recordkeeper proposal comparisons. Great Gray has announced six private-markets CIT shelves in roughly five months, as this publication covered in September, which puts the group on both the product side of the defined-contribution market and the plan-data side.
Edward Jones is not buying a plan advisory practice, which separates it from the consolidation running through retirement advice; Mesirow's purchase of flexPATH's 3(38) book is among the recent examples. A firm with 5.6 million client accounts and $1.01 trillion in registered assets is instead pointing its retail footprint at the business owners already in that book, through a prospecting tool aimed at employers regardless of whether they have a plan. If the platform works as described, the plan is the entry point and participant wealth, rollovers included, is the follow-on business.
The release puts no figure on the build cost, and the platform does not arrive until 2027. The nearer-term question is whether the prospecting tool turns Edward Jones's existing business-owner relationships into plan business, or whether its advisers keep running plan work the way they do now.
Reported by the Retirement Advisers desk from 401(k) Specialist, RCD archive and RCD entity file. Published . Corrections