Ascensus is betting its participant data can solve a problem that has dogged 401(k) advisors for years: turning the savers in the plans they oversee into wealth management clients.
The Dresher, Pennsylvania-based recordkeeper, which serves more than 16 million savers and more than $1.3 trillion in assets under administration, unveiled its workplace-to-wealth platform late last month. The platform flags participants at key financial moments – job changes, rollovers and retirement – and routes them to the advisor already serving their employer's plan.
Though he declined to name names, Dan Morrison, president of Retirement at Ascensus, told InvestmentNews that the first partner firm is going live on the program now.
"I expect, by this time next year, we will have somewhere in the realm of 18 to 20 partners live on this platform and helping savers save more," Morrison said in a recent interview.
The launch lands as new research puts numbers on the gap. A joint study by Cerulli and Morningstar, which drew from a survey of 338 advisors serving defined contribution plans, found that 10.2% of advisors' wealth clients came from DC plan relationships, even though 91.2% place at least a moderate priority on growing their wealth practice. The research flagged capacity, data, and technology gaps as root causes.
Among advisors who don't see growing their wealth business as a high priority, 37.8% said they lack the time to prospect for wealth clients in their DC plans – the most common reason cited. For Morrison, that figure matches the reality he's seen.
"DC is a great place to go and build a wealth business because you get a sponsor to sign on. They're hiring you and effectively endorsing you then to provide advice at the plan level," he said. "Doing it at scale is difficult, and it takes a massive amount of time and energy."
Timing is the other obstacle. Advisors rarely know when a participant is about to change jobs or move their money for some other reason, Morrison said, while recordkeepers sit on that information.
"Now with advancements in AI, we have more data on behaviors than we've ever had access to in the past," he said. "So we can be a force multiplier effectively to identify those participants, identify that they need help."
In announcing its program last month, Ascensus cited Cerulli's U.S. Retirement End-Investor 2025 report, which found that 63% of active 401(k) participants do not have a financial advisor. Morrison suspects that the share of DC plan members engaging with their plan's advisor is even higher.
"[I]t's a massive opportunity on both sides," he said.
As Morrison tells it, the platform combines participant data, advisor engagement tools and referral workflows. When the data signals a life event – "let's say that you change your job or you retire, or you're going to roll your money from your current company to your next company" – Ascensus connects the saver with the advisor the plan sponsor has already hired, often in a fiduciary capacity.
"We have these advisors, we know what participants are doing," Morrison says. "Now we are able to pull the two of them together, and it's just building on the existing trusted relationships."
The changes are happening amid a reshuffling in Ascensus' PE backing structure. In August, Stone Point Capital and Genstar Capital agreed to hold equal stakes in the firm, five years after Stone Point and GIC agreed to buy a majority stake in Ascensus in a deal reportedly valued at about $3 billion.
Unlike custodial referral programs in the RIA space, Ascensus is not imposing asset minimums or other gates on participating firms, Morrison explained. Instead, each partner sets its own criteria.
"Not every advisory firm is going to be able to engage with everyone," he said. "We will work with individual firms and set those parameters. They want to work with individuals over a certain asset minimum or at a certain age, or whatever it is. So we won't be setting that."
For savers who fall below a firm's threshold, Morrison said Ascensus is working to build managed accounts, financial wellness tools and concierge services into the platform. It will also hold rollover IRAs for those savers until they qualify for an advisor.
"We will actually support you in a rollover IRA, for example. And we'll service you and help you," Morrison said. "And then at some point, if you've grown that account and you're ready to be engaged with that advisor, we'll connect you then."
An often-played refrain in Ascensus' pitch is a commitment that it will not chase participants' wealth relationships itself. That stance is aimed at a long-running friction point, namely the question of whether recordkeepers are allies or adversaries to 401(k) advisors.
"We're not competing with anybody, so we get to play Switzerland in this process, but in a really productive way," Morrison said.
Cerulli's joint research with Morningstar notes that recordkeepers with retail wealth or brokerage arms – it cited Fidelity, Schwab and Empower by name – are pursuing rollover and crossover opportunities in the plans they administer. While that has created some tension, researchers found 58% of advisors are willing to set participant "rules of engagement" with those recordkeepers to preserve the working relationship.
Morrison, who spent 22 of his nearly 30 years in recordkeeping at a competitor before joining Ascensus in April, tied the shift to industry economics.
"Fees and margins are coming down. So now you have recordkeepers also going after the DC participants for wealth relationships," he argued. "That then becomes a conflict with most of the wealth advisors. And remember, the wealth advisors are also the DC advisors that bring the plans to the recordkeepers in the first place."
The stakes are large. By Cerulli's reckoning, there were $15.8 trillion in DC plan assets at the end of 2025, and nearly $1 trillion are expected to roll over in 2026.
Morrison said Ascensus has met with dozens of the largest RIAs and presented the program to its top 150 Elite partner advisors at a meeting in Dallas several weeks ago. He said the program, aimed at advisory firms, financial institutions and asset managers with wealth divisions, has garnered significant curiosity and interest.
"I've never seen a group take so many notes and have so many questions and come and grab us after as many times as they did," he said.
"Every saver deserves an advisor," he continued. "We're using our scale and our relationships across the retirement ecosystem to connect more savers with professional financial advice. And at the same time, we're strengthening these relationships that we have rather than competing with the advisors."
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