401（k）土地的主要球员

Firms with serious scale — not boutique specialists — are leading the defined contribution market, according to亚博赞助欧冠’s survey of nearly 500 plan advisers.

The second annual DC Industry Leaders study identified the industry’s toprecord keepers,DC investment–only (DCIO)firms, andbroker-dealersbased on ratings from plan advisers overseeing at least $100 million across multiple plans.

Merrill Lynch, Voya, and Prudential所有记录保持者的讲台,with Nationwide and John Hancock coming in fourth and fifth. Voya made the biggest move up, having not ranked last year, while T. Rowe Price fell from second place in 2017 to seventh.

[IIDeep Dive:Merrill Lynch, Legg Mason, Captrust Top 2017 DC Providers Survey]

The record-keeping industry has been reshaped in recent years by consolidation andclient pressure, according to Callan’s Jamie McAllister, a DC consultant and senior vice president.

“As record keepers are realizing, it’s a fairly low-margin business,” she toldIIin a phone interview. “For them to be profitable, they have to be able to spread their costs over a larger participant base. Five years ago, record keepers would say they needed to have at least one million participants to make their platforms worthwhile. Now when I talk to them, they say more like three to five million. The more that they can achieve scale, the more cost efficient they’re going to look to plan sponsors.”

Merrill Lynch and Prudential each scored another top-five position in the largerDCIL survey，使他们成为多家配有多个配料的公司。去年，只有Merrill Lynch有这种区别，第二个作为经纪人交易商来 - 一个高于今年的第三位完成的现场 - 并领导记录保存类别。

Prudential’s investment arm PGIM, meanwhile,broke into the top five for DCIO, coming fifth behind leader J.P. Morgan (#3 in 2017), BlackRock (#4 in 2017), OppenheimerFunds, and fourth-place finisher Legg Mason (#1 in 2017).

“We are a top-10 DC asset manager, with $170 billion in DC assets,” said Josh Cohen, PGIM’s managing director for defined contribution. “Certainly a fair amount of that is on our record-keeping platform, and other clients are DCIO, which other record keepers administrate. seeing the benefits of both sides of our businesses.”

Overall, Cohen said, “there’smuch more of a focus on outcomes, when it comes to solutions that advisers are looking for. It’s not just about features, the total cost, and bells and whistles on the website. It’s about what’s going to produce better outcomes for the member.”

The top-ranked DC investment providers came as no surprise to one industry expert.

“J.P. Morgan in particular has had very strong success in terms of distribution of their target-date funds,” explained Jessica Sclafani, director of retirement for research firm Cerulli Associates.

At the end of 2016, J.P. Morgan was the fifth-largest目标日期基金经理by assets, Cerulli data showed, with an exceptional 24 percent growth rate year-on-year. “Increasing target-date fund assets by a quarter in one year is impressive,” Sclafani said. “A recognized brand is very important for distribution, and J.P. Morgan has a very well-known and recognized brand. That has served it well among advisers.”

BlackRock, she said, is the best example of a pure DCIO, managing major asset volumes without an attached record keeper. “And that’s a hard thing to do.”

Among broker-dealers,Captrust捍卫其第一排名。Pensiolmark，Merrill Lynch，GRP和UBS圆润前五。普罗斯马是今年今年唯一的新进入者，而不是2017年，取代了摩根士丹利，落后了排行榜。

Again, the consistency in leading providers did not surprise Sclafani. “Change in the DC industry occurs slightly faster than a glacial pace,” she concluded.