1 Year in, Portability Services Network Covers 15,000 Retirement Plans

A little more than one year after the Portability Services Network went live with three of the country’s largest recordkeepers, with three more lined up, it has about 15,000 retirement plans in its system, covering 5 million participants, the PSN announced Tuesday.

The PSN is an initiative from Robert L. Johnson’s Retirement Clearinghouse LLC, a firm specializing in retirement plan consolidation in safe harbor individual retirement accounts. Through the PSN, employees with less than $7,000 in either a workplace defined contribution plan or a safe harbor IRA will see those savings automatically transferred to a new employer plan, as long as its recordkeeper is part of the network.

The network is designed to prevent savers from forgetting about those tax-advantaged savings and to limit them from cashing out. Research from the Retirement Clearinghouse estimates that, over a 40-year period, $1.6 trillion might be preserved in the retirement system if automatic portability was standard across all plan sponsors and recordkeepers.

The participating recordkeepers whose systems are active are Alight, Vanguard and Fidelity Investments, with Empower set to go live in January. TIAA and Principal Financial Group will go live later in 2025, according to the PSN, which is advocating for more plan sponsors to join.

“Auto-portability was conceived as an innovation to benefit minority and women savers, and it is immensely gratifying to witness its coming to fruition,” Johnson, chairman of both the Portability Services Network and Retirement Clearinghouse, said in a statement.

As of December 1, PSN reported that 549 auto-portability transactions have been completed, with a much larger 7,841 transactions underway.

It takes about 30 to 90 days for a terminated participant or a job changer to become eligible for a mandatory distribution, according to a PSN spokesperson. Once the PSN confirms a match for portability, it takes about 60 days for the network’s auto-portability negative-consent process to go through.

There were about 740,000 401(k) plans in the U.S. as of 2022, according to the most recent data from ISS Market Intelligence, which, like PLANADVISER, is owned by ISS STOXX.

The PSN acts as a clearinghouse for locating a participant’s active account and transferring any separate tax-advantaged account with less than $7,000 into the participant’s active account. Recordkeepers that own or participate in the PSN do not receive compensation for facilitating auto-potability transactions from participants; they do, of course, have the ability to keep more funds on their collective platforms.

U.S. savers had $11.3 trillion in DC plans, as of June 30, according to the Investment Company Institute.