Marsh McLennan Agency Adds IRA Offering for ‘Main Street’

Marsh McLennan Agency, a subsidiary of insurance brokerage Marsh, has launched a new individual retirement account providing wealth management services for everyday savers without account balance minimums, the firm’s retirement and wealth head said in an interview Monday.

Marsh McLennan Agency, which provides a range of employee benefits from retirement advisement to health care, launched the new IRA backed by financial technology firm IRALogix Inc. last week, according to Craig Reid, the national practice leader of retirement and wealth for the New York-based firm. The offering, called MMA IRA, is a white label product for employers that Reid says extends Marsh McLennan’s ability to offer a wealth management solution to plan sponsors and their participants of every savings level.

Craig Reid

“There’s no secret that the convergence of wealth and retirement is a real thing,” Reid says. “It is mostly driven by customer demand on both sides [of retirement and wealth management needs] and technology being able to provide a more holistic view for clients.”

While the IRA product will likely get rollovers from retirement accounts, Reid says the firm has also designed the offering for people to use for assets outside of their 401(k).

“We’re not looking at this as a resource to take from the left and move it to the right pocket,” he says. “We’re interested in extending value beyond the 401(k) plan, and … what this program is really designed to offer is that extension of value.”

MMA IRA is designed to provide everyday “Main Street” savers the strategies and tools usually available to institutional investors with no minimum investment threshold, Reid says. The solution is a partnership with IRALogix, a tech-IRA and advice provider that received $11 million in funding from Morningstar Inc. in 2021. Slavic401k, a retirement plan provider for small businesses, partnered with IRALogix in April.

Reid notes that Marsh McLennan Agency has been offering IRAs to clients for years. What makes this IRA offering different is the packaging in a “digital environment at scale” that allows the firm to offer it to the 1.5 million participants it currently serves, he says.

Reid also says to expect more such wealth management innovations from the firm, which is moving into the space in a “bigger way” as it seeks to move client conversations “from health to retirement and retirement into wealth.”

“This is a great piece of a value story to the end user, which in this case is the individual investor,” he says. “We’re working with them on their holistic benefits planning on the health side, the 401(k) savings on the retirement side, we have our financial well-being platform in place for outside assets, and now we have MMA IRA.”