Manulife John Hancock Retirement and Great Gray Trust Company, LLC are joining forces to bring private equity, private credit, infrastructure, and real estate into a new suite of target-date collective investment trusts (CITs) for defined contribution plan participants.
The companies said that the proposed Lifetime Blend+ series would allocate up to 20% of assets to private markets, with the remainder held in Manulife John Hancock-affiliated CITs and stable value products. The move reflects a broader industry push to open private market investments - long the domain of institutional investors - to everyday retirement savers navigating longer lifespans and rising income needs.
"As life expectancy increases and retirement becomes a longer and more complex phase of life, participants need investment solutions built not only to reach retirement, but to help sustain them through it," said Wayne Park, CEO of Manulife John Hancock Retirement, in a statement.
The proposed structure addresses one of the central challenges in bringing private assets to retirement plans: daily valuation and participant-directed trading.
Great Gray Trust Company, LLC - one of the largest independent CIT trustees in the United States, with $371.8 billion in fund assets as of June 30, 2026 - is expected to serve as trustee, providing the fiduciary oversight and operational infrastructure required to hold private-market exposures inside a daily-valued vehicle.
"Private assets have to sit inside a vehicle that values daily, trades on recordkeeping platforms, and meets fiduciary standards," said Rob Barnett, President and CEO of Great Gray Group, parent company of Great Gray. "This collaboration will allow participants and plan sponsors to maintain the familiar experience of selecting a target-date fund with even broader access to diversified investment capabilities."
The partnership builds on an earlier connection between the two firms. Great Gray and iCapital had already announced a collaboration to bring private markets due diligence and manager selection into the CIT space - a development that InvestmentNews reported as one of the more concrete product responses to the growing regulatory interest in alternatives within defined contribution plans.
The private markets sleeve in Lifetime Blend+ is designed with an open-architecture approach, drawing on a mix of internal and external managers. Manulife Investment Management's in-house real estate team and its credit capabilities - delivered through Manulife | CQS Investment Management and Manulife | Comvest Credit Partners - anchor the internal allocations.
External private markets exposure, as currently proposed, would include private equity through Apollo Global Management; infrastructure through J.P. Morgan Asset Management and StepStone Group; and real estate through Townsend. Manulife John Hancock is not affiliated with these firms, and their inclusion does not constitute an endorsement, the companies noted.
At the core of the investment strategy is the Lifetime Through Glidepath, developed by Manulife Investment Management's Multi-Asset Solutions Team. The glidepath is designed to address two competing risks in retirement planning: outliving savings and falling short of income goals.
"Lifetime Blend+ represents a significant development in our offering, bringing together our capabilities across retirement, multi-asset investing, stable value, and private markets with the expertise of external partners designed to help clients pursue their long-term retirement objectives," said David Cohen, Head of U.S. Retirement Investment Product at Manulife John Hancock Investments, in a statement.
The launch comes as the broader target-date market continues its shift toward CITs. CITs now hold more than $2 trillion in target-date assets, overtaking mutual funds for the first time at the start of 2025, according to Morningstar data. That structural shift has opened a pathway for more complex portfolio designs that would have been difficult to implement within the mutual fund wrapper.
However, private market penetration within defined contribution plans remains limited. As InvestmentNews has reported, less than 1% of the roughly $14 trillion held in the defined contribution retirement system is currently invested in private markets, compared with approximately 24% for US public pension funds, according to data from 2023.
Firms including Empower, State Street Global Advisors, and Invesco have each moved to close that gap over the past two years, launching CIT-based solutions with private market allocations of their own.
Lifetime Blend+ is currently in development and subject to final approvals. Manulife John Hancock Retirement services over 56,000 retirement plans with more than 3.3 million participants and over $278 billion in assets under management and administration as of September 30, 2026, according to the company.
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