Nearly 11,000 Americans turn 65 every day. The industry knows how to help people save. Helping them spend is a different problem.
Joshua Dietch, a partner at NMG Consulting, writes in Wealth Management(opens in new tab) that the defined contribution industry has spent decades rewarding specialization. Recordkeepers administered plans. Advisors served employers. Asset managers built products. Insurers provided guarantees. That worked when accumulation was the goal. Decumulation, or drawing down savings in retirement, is different.
Generating retirement income means coordinating Social Security timing, taxes, healthcare costs, outside assets, withdrawal strategies, estate planning, and—where appropriate—guaranteed income. No single product solves that. No single provider can do it alone. And that’s shifting the basis of competition from who has the best product to who can enable the best advice.
NMG’s 2025 DC Advisor Insights Study, based on interviews with 579 retirement advisors, found no emerging consensus around a single income solution. Advisors are assembling strategies based on individual participant needs. Systematic withdrawals are the most common recommendation (75%), followed by target-date funds (51%), out-of-plan annuities (42%), TDFs with guarantees (22%), in-plan annuities (21%), and managed accounts with guarantees (16%).
No single product is winning. Advisors are mixing and matching based on what each participant needs.
Dietch notes that advisors are twice as likely to recommend annuities outside the plan as inside it. The reason: outside the plan, they can weigh the annuity against everything else the participant has—Social Security, other savings, a spouse’s assets—rather than making the decision in isolation.
For recordkeepers, this changes the game. Being “advised” doesn’t always mean having a financial advisor—many participants will continue to rely on their workplace plan for guidance, others will use technology, and some will want human advice. That means recordkeepers have to support multiple advice pathways: intuitive self-service experiences, digital guidance tools, integrated investment and insurance solutions, and access to advisors when complexity warrants it.
Differentiation won’t come from rolling out the next retirement income product. It will come from building the ecosystem(opens in new tab) that brings those capabilities together.
The retirement industry spent decades optimizing products, Dietch writes. The next decade will be defined by optimizing advice. The organizations that win won’t necessarily manufacture the best solutions—they’ll be the ones that help every participant get the right guidance, through the right channel, at the right time.
