Products March 6, 2025

Product and Service Launches – 3/6/25

SEI launches an alternative investment product marketplace; Madison Investments launches CITs with SEI; and Zeplyn offers new workflow capabilities for advisers.

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SEI Launches Alternative Investment Product Marketplace

SEI announced the launch of its alternative investment product marketplace through SEI Access—a platform designed to provide increased access for wealth managers and financial advisers.

SEI Access is broadly available to all registered investment advisers, wealth managers and broker/dealers in the U.S., subject to applicable eligibility and regulatory requirements.

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SEI Access offers wider access to alternative investment products across a variety of asset classes and fund managers, including recent additions Constitution Capital Partners, Golub, Neuberger Berman, OpenVC, StepStone Group and Tall Trees Capital Management, as well as long-time subscription automation technology clients Cantor Fitzgerald, Capital Square and InvestX.

“Access to alternative investment products remains largely exclusive to institutions and high-net-worth investors—and challenges with disclosures, fee structures, valuations, reporting, and manual processes persist,” said Kevin Crowe, senior vice president and head of SEI Access. “SEI Access not only provides automated processing power, but it will deliver wider access to in-demand alternative investments, increased transparency, and robust educational tools to help advisers make confident, personalized financial decisions that align with their clients’ wealth goals.”

Madison Investments Expands Retirement Plan Offerings With CIT Launch

Madison Investments, an employee-owned investment management firm, announced the launch of its collective investment trust offerings, with SEI Trust Co. serving as the CIT trustee.

The new CITs are designed to allow retirement plans to provide actively managed stock or bond portfolios to help plan participants pursue their retirement goals. The strategies include mid-cap, large-cap and core bond. The CITs are available to all qualified retirement plans that utilize CITs.

“Our CITs offer the same disciplined, active management that has earned our portfolios a reputation for reliability and quality,” said Steve Carl, chair of Madison’s executive committee, in a statement. “We are excited to be partnering with SEI on this new endeavor and believe this continues to exhibit to the marketplace our commitment to providing our clients efficient and cost-effective solutions.” 

Zeplyn Launches New Workflow Capabilities for Advisers

Zeplyn, an artificial intelligence platform for wealth management firms, announced a suite of practice management capabilities for advisers. Built on AI, the new features leverage insights captured during client meetings and extend them into new workflows that identify “actionable trends” and streamline the client engagement experience.

“While wealth management firms have been largely cautious about AI, testing the field with low-barrier tools like note-takers, we’ve seen a significant shift,” said Era Jain, co-founder and CEO of Zeplyn. “The combination of our note-taking solution and intelligent workflows has sparked genuine interest about other critical business aspects AI can address.”

The suite of offerings introduces more than 15 new features, including an adviser hub, advanced meeting prep, custom meeting intelligence, comprehensive client recaps and compliance checklists.

Data & Research March 6, 2025

Vanguard Credits Strong Plan Design and Markets for Improved Account Balances

With more defined contribution retirement plans offering automatic features and increasing default deferral rates, Vanguard found that participant outcomes remained strong in 2024.

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Driven primarily by positive market performance, account balance averages increased by 10% in 2024, and 45% of participants increased their deferral rate—either on their own or as part of an automatic annual increase—an all-time high since Vanguard started tracking this metric in 2019,  according to a preview of Vanguard’s “How America Saves 2025” report

“Plan designs have never been stronger,” says Jeff Clark, head of defined contribution research at Vanguard. “What we’ve noticed is that over the last 20 years, the percentage of plans adopting automatic enrollment has increased every year, and last year was not an exception.”

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As of year-end 2024, 61% of Vanguard plans that allowed employee-elective deferrals had adopted automatic enrollment. Larger plans—those with at least 1,000 participants—were more likely to implement automatic enrollment, with 78% using the design.

In addition, with automatic enrollment defaulted their employees into the plan at a rate of at least 4%, and Vanguard found that default rates have continued to increase every year.

Investing Trends

On the investment side, 67% of participants now have a professionally managed allocation, which Clark says is up from 45% in 2014. The majority of those invested in a professionally managed allocation are in target-date funds, with 60% of participants in pure TDFs and 7% using an in-plan managed account.

Clark says overall advice and managed account usage has been relatively flat compared with the previous year.

“But it’s also important to remember that each year, more plans are offering advice,” Clark says. “Sometimes it takes [time] to organically grow participants using advice, so that is a number that we do think will start to increase in the coming years, as there’s more stability and plans [have been] offering advice for a longer period of time.”

At the end of 2024, nearly 80% of participants had access to managed account advice services, according to Vanguard.

Vanguard also noted that participant trading, or exchange activity, was low last year, with only 5% of participants initiating an exchange in 2024, similar to 2023’s all-time low. Clark says overall participant trading has been decreasing over the last 20 years, much of it correlated with the increase of pure-TDF investing.

Alight Solutions similarly found in the fourth quarter of 2024 that retirement investors’ trading was light following a post-election bump. However, the late stock stumble, coupled with the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut, fueled increased trading in December.

Hardship Withdrawals

The Vanguard report preview also revealed that hardship withdrawal activity increased in 2024, with 4.8% of participants initiating a hardship withdrawal, up from 3.6% in 2023.

Clark notes that one reason for the increase in hardship withdrawals could be because as more plans are offering auto-enrollment, it can disproportionately help lower-income workers save for retirement. These are also workers who tend to have liquidity restraints and may need to take a hardship withdrawal, Clark says.

He adds that the distribution process itself has been streamlined, and there has been increased financial stress on individuals over the last few years.

“Given higher interest rates, stubborn inflation [and] rising household debt, hardship withdrawals may serve as a bit of a safety net for some participants,” Clark says.

Clark says there the increase in hardship withdrawals was particularly notable in the second half of 2024, largely due to natural disaster declarations that enable participants to take out money to repair homes following natural disasters.

In terms of plan loans, 13% of participants had a loan outstanding at the end of 2024, in line with 2023 data.

“I think that this trend highlights the importance of just overall financial wellness and certainly the benefits of having an emergency savings fund that would help to cover some of these unplanned expenses,” Clark says.

The full “How America Saves” report will be released in June.

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