In mid 2025, the project completed its final phase to survey 150+ plan sponsors to understand barriers to retirement income adoption and perspectives on how to integrate products into plan design. Taken together, the findings provide a window into obstacles and the conditions needed for broader adoption.

October 2025: The RRC gathered in Minneapolis, MN for a Summit geared towards personalization. Topics explored personalization from multiple angles, including challenges to traditional asset allocation assumptions, participant misconceptions about the cor

October 2025: The RRC gathered in Minneapolis, MN for a Summit geared towards personalization. Topics explored personalization from multiple angles, including challenges to traditional asset allocation assumptions, participant misconceptions about the cor

Interest in emergency savings programs is growing amid an increasingly holistic approach to workplace savings programs, in part due to a recognition that reducing retirement plan leakage is a key way to produce positive retirement outcomes, and emergency savings programs may help.

The value chain in financial markets has both upstream and downstream participants. At one end of the value stream, those who are upstream are entrepreneurs creating value. Successively farther downstream are early-stage investors and intermediaries; they are followed by institutional investors, including pension funds, at the end of the chain. When pension funds are at the downstream end of the value chain, they do not benefit much from value creation farther upstream, due to the drag of high fees often charged by intermediaries such as mutual funds.

With the gradual disappearance of defined benefit (DB) pension plans for workers in the private sector, and their replacement by defined contribution (DC) retirement plans and individual retirement accounts (IRA), at the same time as life expectancy is increasing, analysts and public policymakers have grown concerned with the loss of automatic lifetime income flows to retirees aside from Social Security.

The third and final paper of the CIT series synthesizes findings from the CIT Survey and 15+ interviews to explore CIT demand, benefits, challenges, and innovation within DC plans. This paper looks ahead at what could be next for CITs based on survey findings, third-party research, and information gleaned through the interviews we conducted with industry stakeholders.