Digital Retirement Rollover Firm Capitalize Raises Series B Funding

The company will use the $19 million capital raise to support locating and then transferring legacy retirement account rollovers.

Capitalize Money Inc., a firm that digitally transfers retirement savings from accounts such as 401(k)s to individual retirement accounts, announced Wednesday it raised $19 million in a Series B fundraising round.

Venture capital firm RRE Ventures led the campaign, which included participation from existing funders Canapi Ventures and Bling Capital and new investor Industry Ventures. The firm’s Series A fundraising round, led by Canapi, was in 2021 and brought in $12.5 million.

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The funders are backing Capitalize’s business model of creating a more seamless system for transferring assets from retirement accounts into IRAs, including from consumers, recordkeepers and via financial firms offering IRAs. Capitalize makes money from its partner network when a rollover is made with one of its preferred IRA partners, when a user pays an additional fee to roll over into a non-preferred provider or when a user pays for premium services. Capitalize does not allow preferred partners to alter content on its platform, according to the firm.

The market for IRAs in the U.S. is massive. The investment vehicles accounted for the most retirement assets at $14.3 trillion as of the year’s first quarter, according to the Investment Company Institute. Defined contribution assets came in second among retirement pools at $11.1 trillion.

Capitalize, which launched in 2020, is processing “several billion dollars” of rollover volume annually, according to the firm. Both rollover volume and its revenue have grown by about six times in the last 18 months, according to the firm. Much of that growth has come from its “enterprise” model, called Embedded Rollover API, which offers financial firms the ability to embed Capitalize’s rollover technology directly into onboarding and funding flow for customers moving legacy, employer-sponsored retirement accounts into an IRA.

Capitalize’s enterprise partners, as listed on its website, include Betterment, Charles Schwab, M1 Finance, Robinhood and SoFi. The firm did not immediately respond to comment for a list of preferred partners.

“Together [with funder RRE], we’re excited to keep modernizing the antiquated rollover process so that Americans can better move and manage their money, and our partners can serve their users more efficiently,” said Gaurav Sharma, Capitalize’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

The firm notes the “manual” 401(k) rollover process that often involves paperwork and communication between multiple financial institutions to roll over employer-sponsored retirement savings. The firm, which has issued its own study on the subject of left-behind 401(k) assets, pegs the market at some $1.65 trillion.

The issue of leftover accounts has also been a focus of the Retirement Clearinghouse LLC, which started the Portability Services Network, currently made up of the country’s six largest recordkeepers. The network is designed to automatically transfer defined contribution assets between providers, should someone leave or forget their assets with a partnered provider.

In a separate announcement made Tuesday, a firm called Equity Trust Co. launched a self-directed IRA for its clients, designed to provide more options available in the savings vehicle.

Equity Trust’s Universal IRA allows users to invest their savings in both traditional and alternative assets. The firm, which has $52 billion in assets under custody and administration, has set up the IRA to provide the option of investing in assets, including real estate, private equity and cryptocurrency, according to the announcement.

“This capability eliminates the cumbersome process of managing accounts at multiple IRA companies to achieve true diversification,” the firm wrote.

TDF Assets Continue Climb Through July

The popular retirement savings default vehicle reached a new high for assets held by the top providers, according to Simfund data.

Target-date funds, that time-tested method for retirement saving accumulation, are showing no signs of slowing down so far this year: Total assets for the savings vehicles hit a record $1.856 trillion among top providers tracked by data provider Simfund through the end of July.

TDF assets grew steadily each month from April through July among the largest 25 providers, as driven primarily by market growth and inflows from passively invested vehicles, according to Simfund. The market data provider, like PLANADVISER, is owned by ISS STOXX.

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The top providers, as ranked by only TDF asset flow through July by Simfund, were as below. Capital Group, the leader for the time period as seen below, noted a larger figure when taking into account the full family of its TDFs of $10.1 billion.

Manager Parent Net New Flows $MM – YTD through July
American Funds (Capital Group) 6,970.0
Vanguard 4,778.1
State Street 631.9
Charles Schwab 579.2
Franklin Templeton 223.5
GuideStone Capital Management 135.2
Natixis Advisors 17.8
Equitable Financial 5.0
Voya Investments -12.5
Dimensional Fund Advisors -3.9
Total $13.3 billion

Source: ISS MI Simfund

When looking at total TDF assets by firm overall, the leaders are: Vanguard, Fidelity Investments, Capital Group’s American Funds and T. Rowe Price, according to Simfund.

Michael Cagnina, a senior vice president and managing director for SEI Investment Co.’s institutional business, has also seen continued growth in the total TDF space, according to a defined-contribution-investment-only assessment sent via email. That includes a mix of passive and active strategies, and “an increasing number of plan sponsors are adopting all-passive target-date series, while others integrate active management selectively,” he says.

At SEI, Cagnina notes, the firm takes a blended approach with plan sponsor clients, using active management in “less efficient market segments” and in areas where indices are difficult to replicate. In all cases, plan fiduciaries still must balance the cost for reward of strategies, he said.

“In this context, governance and cost-efficiency are key considerations, as plan sponsors must navigate the trade-offs between active management’s potential for outperformance and the typically lower fees associated with passive strategies,” says Cagnina.

Simfund’s dataset, which dates back to 1990, hit its previous highest TDF asset peak in 2021 at $1.765 trillion.

Correction: This story originally showed total flows for firms that included open-end funds, which changed the top ten firms listed and outcomes. This version now corrects to only consider TDF flows. We apologize for this error.

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