Retirement Industry People Moves

Tamara (Tami) Jackson has joined Amundi Smith Breeden as a senior vice president in the U.S. institutional market advisory group.

Jackson heads institutional business development efforts in the western region of the country across all institutional channels. This includes developing and strengthening relationships with regional client consultants to build advocacy for the firm’s investment strategies.

Before joining Amundi Smith Breeden, Jackson was a director of institutional business development at BNP Paribas Investment Partners, where she built relationships with large U.S. public pension plans. Before that, Jackson spent six years as a managing director and senior vice president of institutional marketing at Northern Trust Global Investments, working with major U.S. plan prospects, clients and consultants. Jackson has also held senior marketing roles at Dresdner RCM Global Investors and Spare, Kaplan, Bischel & Associates.

Jackson is based in California and reports to Elke Urban, executive vice president, chief market advisory officer, who cites Jackson’s experience with pension plans and their consultants, and deep understanding of their asset-allocation needs as invaluable assets to the firm.

Jackson holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a master’s degree in business administration in finance from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management.

Amundi Smith Breeden is the center of the Amundi Group’s U.S. fixed income expertise and serves as the North American investment headquarters for Amundi, a global asset management firm that reports it has more than $1 trillion in assets under management.

United Retirement Plan Consultants has partnered with Vertical Management Systems, a data and tech provider, to provide complete recordkeeping solutions through the VMS Retirement Revolution platform. 

The VMS retirement platform combines features of brokerage, trust and custody accounting systems in a single product. The platform’s modern and flexible technology enables third-party administrators (TPAs) to deliver integrated solutions.   

According to John Davis, president and chief executive of United Retirement Plan Consultants, the collaboration allows the TPA to bring financial intermediaries and their clients a fully integrated and optimal retirement plan solution that can be customized to client goals.

Bob Ward, VMS chief revenue officer, cites United Retirement Plan Consultants’ national network of local experts and scope of TPA services as well aligned with VMS’ mission to deliver cost-effective and feature-rich retirement tech to the retirement industry.