Ascensus TPA president leaves company

Jerry Bramlett, head of Ascensus’s third-party administrator FuturePlan, left the company on Monday.

Ascensus CEO David Musto has taken the helm of FuturePlan on an interim basis, while the firm searches for a replacement, a spokesperson confirmed via email.

The circumstances that prompted the departure were unclear.

“Mr. Bramlett believes this is an appropriate time for him to leave his role as president of FuturePlan,” the firm said in the email statement. “He came to Ascensus more than two years ago to lead the line of business’ early growth and journey to a position of market leadership, and by all accounts he has achieved this important objective.”

Bramlett declined to comment.

He was hired in April 2018 as the leader of Ascensus’s TPA Solutions division, reporting to Musto, the company announced at the time. Bramlett was tasked with “[profit and loss] management, sales, services, operations, relationship and practice management, and employee engagement and talent management,” the announcement read.

Bramlett is known for founding The 401(k) Company in 1983, which later became a full-service firm with record-keeping and advisory services. Prior to his hiring by Ascensus, he was a managing director at Sage Advisory Services and a managing partner at Redstar Advisors.

FuturePlan is the country’s largest third-party administrator, according to Ascensus. Like the parent firm, FuturePlan has grown quickly over the past several years through acquisitions — it represents more than 30 TPAs across the country that the firm has bought.

That growth strategy has been fueled by the company’s private-equity backers, including Aquiline Capital Partners and Genstar Capital, which acquired Ascensus in 2015 from J.C. Flowers & Co.

In early 2019, another group of private-equity investors led by Atlas Merchant Capital snapped up a 25% stake in Ascensus. Prior to that, Aquiline and Genstar had considered selling Ascensus in its entirety for a reported asking price of $2 billion, according to a 2018 report by Bloomberg.

As of the end of March, FuturePlan had more than 55,500 plan clients, representing more than $86 billion in assets under administration, according to the firm. The company had about 1,500 employees across 50 offices at the time.