Empower to Offer Income Products From Allianz, Putnam and TIAA

Empower has further expanded its investment offerings that leverage annuities to create a pension-like paycheck for participants.

On Thursday, the recordkeeper announced the addition of income options from Allianz Life and Putnam Investments, a Franklin Templeton company, which is leveraging TIAA’s fixed annuity option.

The Putnam Retirement Advantage Income Series of target-date funds is trusteed by Great Gray Trust Co. LLC and is available to plan sponsors and their participants through a TDF. The guaranteed income is a conversion option provided by TIAA.

Allianz Lifetime Income+ Annuity will be available at Empower, beginning on January 1, 2025, through Empower’s advice and planning solution, My Total Retirement, or through retirement managed accounts with advisers. Additionally, in early 2025, plans will be able to access T. Rowe Price’s investment offering within Empower’s managed account solution with the option to include Allianz Lifetime Income+.

The announcement adds to in-plan and out-of-plan retirement income options Empower announced in March. Those included target-date-fund options that include an annuity-backed lifetime income withdrawal benefit, along with access to an institutionally-priced annuity marketplace.

“Partnering with Allianz Life and Franklin Templeton and adding more products like these to our current suite of income offerings will help provide confidence to many individuals as they prepare for the futures they’ve worked so hard to achieve,” Rich Linton, Empower’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

The Putnam and TIAA TDF option is designed to build up savings over the course of a worker’s lifetime while also helping to solve for guaranteed income once they retire, Brendan McCarthy, head of retirement investing at Nuveen, a TIAA company, wrote via email.

“Target-dates have done a great job of getting the American worker ‘to retirement’—this next generation of annuity target-date funds does a great job of getting the American worker through retirement by providing the option of income in retirement that they can’t outlive,” he said.

TIAA’s Secure Income Account annuity gives participants the option to annuitize, but does not require it, he noted.

The Allianz product allows participants to adjust the income they seek from the annuity and to maintain cash access to the value of the annuity, according to the firm.

“As the only in-plan annuity on Empower’s platform designed as an individual contract, Allianz Lifetime Income+ ensures seamless portability options without any changes to fees, features, or benefits,” Allianz wrote in a statement.

Morningstar Inc. will be behind the investment strategies in the managed accounts and adviser-managed accounts administering the investment.

Empower is the second-largest recordkeeper for defined contribution participants with 17.4 million, according to the 2024 PLANSPONSOR Recordkeeping Survey. Fidelity Investments is the largest with 31.8 million. PLANSPONSOR is a sister publication of PLANADVISER.

Separately, on Thursday, Nationwide announced a new digital tool for participants to consider their retirement income strategy and plan. Its “My Income & Retirement Planner” will give a “chance of success” score on obtaining the right amount of retirement income and will be able to review and compare withdrawal strategies.

The tool will be available to the roughly 2.7 million participants on Nationwide’s recordkeeping platform.

Correction: clarifies the offering for the Putnam income product.