Financial Wellness Fuels Retirement Wealth Convergence

Financial advisers are increasingly leveraging defined contribution retirement plans as a strategic entry point into full-service wealth management relationships, signaling a structural shift in how advisory practices generate growth. Research from Advisor Insight, a benchmarking and business intelligence service for financial advisers and part of the Fuse Research Network LLC, indicates that wealth management—once considered an ancillary service line—is evolving into a measurable expansion channel for advisory firms.

While most advisers are not dedicated retirement plan specialists, 62% of respondents reported converting at least 6% of DC plan participants into wealth management clients, and 65% said participant conversion was easier than acquiring clients through traditional marketing or referral strategies.

Firm scale appears to amplify that advantage. Among surveyed advisers managing more than $500 million in assets, 41% converted at least 15% of plan participants into wealth clients, compared with 28% of advisers overseeing less than $100 million—suggesting that firms with broader planning capabilities may be better positioned to institutionalize participant outreach.

Expanding the Adviser’s Role

The expansion of financial wellness programs is a central catalyst behind this model. Nearly 60% of advisers surveyed said they provided holistic financial advice or one-on-one consultations to participants within the plans they oversee, extending conversations beyond plan design and investment oversight to budgeting, debt management and retirement income planning.

As those conversations expand, advisers gain visibility into non-plan assets and liabilities, creating natural entry points for comprehensive wealth planning. Financial wellness initiatives are effectively repositioning advisers from plan-level consultants to embedded financial partners within the workplace, according to the Advisor Insight report.

As financial wellness programs deepen engagement and reduce client acquisition friction, the boundary between retirement specialist and wealth adviser continues to erode, suggesting the shift is structural. That evolution is being driven by a reorientation toward participant-level engagement.

“The key to success as a retirement plan adviser is to center every practice and service around the ultimate beneficiaries of the retirement plan—the plan participants,” said Alvaro Galvis of Merrill Lynch in Alpharetta, Georgia, a 2025 PLANADVISER Top Adviser, in an interview last year. “For too long, participants have been overlooked and left with little more than an 800 number for transactions.”

As the industry shifts away from committee-centric servicing models to direct employee relationships, the same dynamics are increasingly visible in merger-and-acquisition activity. Wealth managers and retirement specialists are combining capabilities to deliver integrated advice models with unified growth strategies, rather than operating in parallel silos.

An online survey of more than 500 generalist advisers across all channels, including broker/dealers and registered investment advisers, was conducted in late 2025 through Fuse’s online Advisor Insight, an advisor benchmarking service. Approximately three-quarters of surveyed advisers served one or more DC plans.