Deals & People December 4, 2024

Prudential Promotes Global Investment Leader Sullivan to CEO

Charles Lowrey will remain chairman, with Andrew Sullivan running the insurer and asset manager and Jacques Chappuis taking over as CEO of PGIM.

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Andrew Sullivan

The board of directors of Prudential Financial Inc. announced Tuesday the appointment of Andrew Sullivan as the next CEO of the insurer and investment manager, effective March 31, 2025

Sullivan currently serves as executive vice president and head of international business and global investment management, overseeing Prudential’s international insurance business unit and PGIM, its $1.4 trillion asset management business.  

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Sullivan will succeed Charles F. Lowrey, the current chair and CEO of Prudential; Lowrey will continue to chair the board.  

Jacques Chappuis, named head of PGIM in November, will report to Sullivan, effective in May. Chappuis came from Morgan Stanley Investment Management and will succeed David Hunt, who will retire in May and remain on as chairman until July 31, 2025.

“Andy is an exceptional leader who brings a deep understanding of our businesses, our strategy, our people, and our customers to this role, and I have every confidence that he is the right leader to take Prudential into the future,” Lowrey said in a statement.  

In addition to Sullivan and Chappuis’ appointments, the firm announced several upcoming personnel changes: 

  • Caroline Feeney, currently an executive vice president and head of U.S. businesses, was named global head of insurance and retirement, effective March 31, 2025, reporting to Sullivan; 
  • Lowrey will continue in the position of executive chair for the next 18 months; and  
  • Robert Falzon, vice chair of the firm, will retire, effective July 11, 2025, after 42 years at the firm. 

Sullivan joined Prudential in 2011. Prior, he was a senior vice president at BlueCross BlueShield and held senior leadership positions at Cigna for eight years. He served as a nuclear submarine officer in the U.S. Navy, having earned a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He also holds an executive MBA from the Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware.  

“I am honored to have the opportunity to lead this company as it embarks on its next chapter,” Sullivan said in a statement. “I look forward to working with Prudential’s leadership team and employees to advance our strategy and expand Prudential’s position as a leader in investing, insurance, and retirement security.” 

Prudential is active in the pension risk transfer market, completing more than $90 billion in risk transfer transactions since 2011, according to the firm. 

Client Service December 3, 2024

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

According to the network started by Retirement Clearinghouse to transfer ‘stranded’ workplace balances, it has more than 7,800 transactions in process.

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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.

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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.

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