Office address: 8515 E. Orchard Road, Greenwood Village, CO 80111
Website: empower.com
Year established: 2023
Company type: financial services
Employees: 13,000+
Expertise: IRA and brokerage services, wealth management and financial planning, investment management and model portfolios, digital personal finance dashboards and tools, fiduciary advisory and managed accounts
Parent company: Empower Annuity Insurance Company of America (EAICA)
Key people: Edmund Murphy III (CEO), Carol Waddell (president), Craig Birk (chief investment officer), Roger Hobby (EVP), and Steven Stillman (SVP)
Financing status: corporation/corporate‑backed division
Empower Personal Wealth (EPW) is the retail wealth division of Empower, one of the largest US retirement plan providers by participants. It combines a free personal finance dashboard used by about 4 million people with paid advisory, investment and cash products for individual households.
Empower traces its roots to 1891, when parent company Great‑West Life started as an insurance business in Winnipeg. The firm entered the US in 1906 by opening a sales office in Fargo.
A year later, it set up a US subsidiary in Kansas and started crafting retirement products for American employers. As federal retirement rules grew over the following decades, the company rolled out plans under sections 401(a), 403(b) and 457.
The business relocated its US headquarters to Greenwood Village in 1983 after running out of room in downtown Denver. Through the 1980s and 1990s, it expanded into 401(k) plan services and developed a proprietary recordkeeping system for retirement plans.
It then picked up 401(k) and defined benefit books from companies like MetLife affiliates and Franklin Templeton to broaden its reach. Those deals gave the company the scale to serve a wider mix of private employers and public sector plans.
In 2014, Great‑West Lifeco merged three of its US retirement units into one business and branded it Empower. The combined entity had more than 7 million participants at launch, according to the company's own timeline.
Growth came through a series of acquisitions, including the 2020 purchase of Personal Capital, a digital wealth manager that offered a free financial dashboard.
Empower used the Personal Capital technology stack and advisory team to form Empower Personal Wealth as its own division in 2023. The new unit paired the free Empower Personal Dashboard with paid portfolio management and financial planning for individual households.
In 2023, Empower reported fullyear base earnings of $749 million. Empower Personal Wealth had about $72 billion in AUM after 31 percent year‑over‑year growth from net inflows and market gains.
In 2024, Empower Personal Wealth's assets rose about 23 percent YoY as it added clients from both workplace plans and direct investors.
Empower Personal Wealth combines free personal finance tools with fee-based advisory, investment and cash products for individual investors:
Advisory runs through Empower Advisory Group, an SEC-registered advisor, and trades go through Empower Financial Services, a FINRA member broker-dealer.
Empower describes its culture as "customer obsessed, accountable, growth-focused, constantly improving and inclusive." More than 23 percent of its associates belong to at least one business resource group.
Empower Personal Wealth lists five core values:
Empower also offers remote, hybrid and in-office setups across 11 US locations and two global offices. Benefits for full-time associates include:
Empower Personal Wealth says its associates logged more than 41,000 volunteer hours in 2024, and the company reported almost $4 million in nonprofit donations that year. The firm also partners with Disability:IN, Wall Street Bound, Quad A, and HACR on hiring pipelines.
Edmund Murphy III is president and CEO of Empower, the parent of Empower Personal Wealth. Before this, he worked at Putnam, Veritude, and Fidelity. Murphy studied at Boston College and in Harvard's General Manager Program.
Murphy also works with:
Empower Personal Wealth's leadership group sets direction for products, advice, and service while dedicated operations, technology, and compliance teams run day-to-day activities.
Empower bought Plan Management Corporation, an equity plan administrator, in 2024 to bring stock compensation services in-house through the OptionTrax platform. The deal adds about $62 billion in equity plan assets across 300 employers, covering stock options, purchase plans and restricted shares.
Empower Personal Wealth clients stand to gain from the move because the company wants all holdings visible on a single dashboard, from retirement accounts to employer stock. CEO Edmund Murphy said more deals are likely as smaller providers keep exiting the retirement and wealth markets.
"More acquisitions are clearly in our future," says CEO.
The firm has seen earnings grow 19% year-over-year across its business.
The company has grown enormously in a short amount of time, and is poised to expand more into small retirement plans and wealth management.
The 10-year-old firm has seen strong growth in its assets, client base, and earnings.
