Aon Selects Vanguard as Next PEP Recordkeeper

Aon PLC announced today its selection of Vanguard as recordkeeper and trustee for the Aon Pooled Employer Plan, which reported $4.915 billion in assets and more than 87,000 participants in its Form 5500 for the 2025 plan year.

Voya Financial recordkept the PEP since its inception in 2021.

As part of the deal, Aon announced that it plans to expand the availability of Vanguard investment options within the PEP, including diversified target-date and core index strategies. Aon also intends to offer participants additional advice solutions, educational content and financial wellness resources that are available through Vanguard, in addition to more coordinated plan administration. According to the announcement, participating employers will continue to retain control over key plan design choices, including matching contributions, eligibility requirements and vesting schedules.

“We view this [recordkeeper selection] as an evolution and enhancement to the Aon PEP,” says Rick Jones, an Aon senior partner of wealth solutions and leader of the Aon PEP. Aon aims to “utilize the scale, efficiency, cost savings [and] participant-focused resources that Vanguard can add to the equation.”

Aon’s Jones says that with Vanguard as the PEP’s new recordkeeper, all participating employers and plan participants will experience cost savings, including the “regular and ongoing charges for administering and participating in the plan.” He says the partnership will provide those savings, “coupled with the availability of additional resources at attractive rates.”

Snapshot of the Marketplace

Aon’s PEP had approximately $7.7 billion in assets as of September 2, serving more than 160 employers with more than 103,000 participants, according to the company. In August 2025, Aon reported that its PEP had reached the $5 billion asset mark.

Meanwhile, Transamerica Retirement Services LLC yesterday revealed that its pooled plan assets, including PEP, multiple employer plan and group plan solutions, grew to $34.2 billion last year, up nearly 61% from $21.3 billion in 2021. The number of adopting employers increased by nearly 40% over that period.

At the end of 2025, in total, 330 PEPs with 10,797 participating employers, serving more than 1.2 million participants, held $34 billion in assets, according to the 2026 PLANSPONSOR Recordkeeping Survey. Voya ($6.198 billion in assets), Transamerica Retirement Solutions ($5.353 billion) and Principal Financial Group ($4.684 billion) recordkept the most PEP assets. Aon, which did not participate in the survey, stated in its 2026 promotional materials that it has more than $6 billion in PEP assets.

PEP Growth Trajectory

Reflecting on the growth of the PEP market in the five years since PEPs debuted, Aon’s Jones says he anticipates the plans will continue as important parts of the employer-sponsored retirement landscape, largely due to the cost savings they have already spurred for employers.

In a LinkedIn post Jones made last month, he shared that when a chemical company joined the Aon PEP in 2021, total plan costs immediately declined by approximately 35%. As the company grew and its 401(k) participation increased, per-participant costs declined by an additional 32%. Participants also benefited from continued reductions in investment-related expenses, which decreased by 20% across 2025 and 2026, according to Jones. This year, plan costs for the organization are 63% lower than when it entered the PEP, he wrote.

Ted Schmelzle, vice president of retirement plan services at the Standard Insurance Co., a subsidiary of StanCorp Financial Group Inc., says the greatest sign of potential PEP growth he has seen is that employers are asking about them. While advisers and recordkeepers understood and asked questions about PEPs at their debut in 2021 as a provision of the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019, employers are now asking their advisers if they should be considering a PEP—and asking their recordkeepers if they have a PEP to offer.

“When employers start asking for this, then you really have to have this as a capability in order to compete,” Schmelzle says. “The more that this gains traction independently with employers as a mechanism to outsource their work, the more we’re going to see traction in the pooled employer space.”