Raymond James launches a retirement plan it will not run

Raymond James has made a small-business retirement plan available to its roughly 8,900 advisors, a firm-wide rollout disclosed in a regulatory filing and confirmed by a spokesperson. The SIMPLE IRA Employer Advisory and Consulting Services Program, or SIACS, built with Capital Group American Funds, is designed for companies with up to 100 employees and pairs an IRA with 401(k)-style features such as customizable investment menus and company matching.

The filing is precise about the division of labor: Raymond James will send each plan an annual investment report, join employer meetings about the plan, and help select the qualified default investment option, but it will not hold custody of plan assets, exercise trading authority, or carry responsibility for plan administration or compliance. Participant education, promised periodically, expressly stops short of individualized investment advice, which the filing treats as a separate service; fees rise with the size of the sponsor.

Those divisions decide the economics: Raymond James is handing advisors a product to put in front of small-business owners without absorbing the custody, trading, and compliance costs that make running a plan expensive, and what the filing describes is closer to a distribution arrangement than a plan-administration business—a deliberate split that keeps the advisor's seat at the owner's table while the plan's back office lives elsewhere. That non-discretionary, no-custody role leaves plan compliance with the employer and its providers, which is what lets an advisor raise retirement planning with a business-owner client without the firm becoming the plan's fiduciary.

For Raymond James advisors, the value sits in a familiar conversation: a founder whose personal balance sheet is already under management asks what to do about the staff, and the advisor now has a firm-branded answer instead of a referral that walks out the door with the relationship and often the assets behind it. That is the case for building the service even when the firm never touches a plan's assets.

The bet is not Raymond James' alone. Edelman Financial Engines announced its own expansion into the small and mid-sized business market last week through a partnership with payroll and retirement services provider ADP, and Cerulli Associates projects the number of retirement plans growing from roughly 830,000 in 2025 to more than one million by 2030, with small businesses expected to start most of them. State mandates and tax incentives supply part of that demand, according to Cerulli, making the growth a policy story as much as a wealth-management one.

This publication has argued that the advisor talent war has decoupled from custody and solo breakaways, with retirement-plan platforms absorbing the traffic, and the SIACS filing is that argument compressed into a rulebook. The same firm lost a $545 million team to FiNet in August and answered by hiring a Wells Fargo veteran, and it separately brought on a Schwab veteran to lead client experience in its RIA custody business. Add a retirement-plan shelf and the logic holds: what keeps an advisor is a set of services the advisor cannot build alone, and the firm that assembles the most of them at the lowest cost to itself wins the retention argument without paying for it in recruiting checks.

The product itself is narrow: a government-backed SIMPLE IRA meant to give small employers a cost-effective way to offer retirement savings, and SIACS is explicitly non-discretionary, stopping before individualized advice and custody.

Whether the entry point converts is a question about plan counts, which the filing does not supply. What it does supply is the shape of the strategy: buy the door to a market Cerulli expects to top one million plans by 2030 and pay for it with a partner's product and the advisors' existing relationships. Raymond James has decided it would rather make the introduction than keep the books, and the number that grades that decision, when it comes, will be the honest scorecard for a strategy more than one large wealth manager is now running.