Voya expands advisor managed accounts to add private market assets

Voya Financial is expanding its advisor managed accounts program to let registered investment advisors allocate retirement plan participants' savings to private equity, private credit and private real estate.

The move announced Tuesday pushes alternative assets further into the 401(k) mainstream at a moment when federal regulators are reconsidering how much latitude plan fiduciaries should have to offer them.

The New York-based retirement and benefits company, which serves more than 18 million customer relationships, said the enhanced capabilities build on the AMA platform it launched in 2021, which already lets independent RIAs pair participant education with professionally managed, personalized portfolios inside employer-sponsored plans.

In 2024, it opened up an expanded range of non-core investments in the AMA program, giving third-party RIAs the ability to offer invesment options beyond a plan's menu of core investments.

With Voya's latest update, advisors will initially get access to Voya Investment Management's newly launched V-ALT collective investment trusts, along with two Blue Owl Capital vehicles: OWLCX, an alternative credit CIT, and ORENT, a real estate net lease CIT.

What Voya is adding to its managed accounts platform

Amy Vaillancourt, president of retirement at Voya, said the expanded lineup is meant to give plan sponsors a way to extend private market access without asking participants to navigate it alone. "Professionally managed solutions like advisor managed accounts can help participants navigate more complex investment options with greater confidence," she said.

Private markets have traditionally been the province of institutional investors and the wealthy, largely because of long lock-up periods, opaque valuations and minimum investment sizes that put them out of reach for most defined-contribution plan participants.

Voya said it has spent roughly a decade folding private assets into custom asset-allocation portfolios and is now extending that experience across the AMA platform, with plans to add managers and strategies through its existing governance process over time.

The expansion lands three months after Voya publicly backed a Department of Labor proposal that would rewrite the fiduciary standard governing which investments plan sponsors may designate for participants.

The proposal, which the Employee Benefits Security Administration floated in March, would outline how fiduciaries can “objectively, thoroughly, and analytically” evaluate factors such as performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, benchmarks and complexity when selecting designated investment alternatives.

Shortly after, Voya said it welcomed the department's proposed framework in selecting designated investment alternatives, which is designed to avoid endorsing or excluding any specific asset class. Vaillancourt said at the time that expanding investment choice "requires strong fiduciary governance, participant education and the involvement of financial professionals."

Read more: Industry groups want tweaks to DOL's 401(k) fiduciary proposal

What research says about managed accounts

Independent research offers some support for that model, at least for managed accounts without private asset exposure.

A study last year from Morningstar, which tracked nearly 85,000 participants who opted into its Morningstar Retirement Manager service, found 65% of participants who were behind on retirement savings increased their deferral rates after enrolling, with a median increase of two percentage points.

The same study found that participants who had been building do-it-yourself portfolios saw the largest gains in portfolio efficiency once they moved into professionally managed allocations.

"The analysis conducted so far suggests that participants, on average, who enroll in managed accounts are likely to experience higher returns and save more for retirement, although the likely impact varies based on participant attributes (for example, whether the participant is on track to retire)," the authors of the report wrote.

Read more: Why I changed my mind on advisor managed accounts

They also emphasized the potential impact of fees, which retirement plan participants would typically expect to pay as they opt into AMA programs. Assuming a fee of 40 basis points, the researchers projected a positive change in wealth for both DIY investors and those using asset-allocation funds, whether or not they were on track to hit their retirement goals.

"However, should a participant deviate from the advice that managed accounts provides or unenroll from the service, then the value of managed accounts would be rendered moot, as its value lies in the participant following the advice it provides," the report said.