Retirement benefits

It bears paying attention in the coming year as to what inroads digital-first firms can make into the DC space.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the administration's "myRA" retirement plan will be available nationwide, with an expanded menu of funding options.

Municipal bond sales in the U.S. are set to decrease in the next month while the amount of redemptions and maturing debt rises.

Almost half of U.S. workers didn’t have a company-sponsored retirement plan in 2013, compared with 39% in 1999, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York.

The median state pension last year had 70% of the assets needed to meet promised benefits, up from 69.2% in 2013.

Small market participants have less access to support and appear to be less knowledgeable and engaged in their workplace retirement plans.

Employees are gaining confidence in their short-term finances but the majority is still not saving enough for retirement.

Having developed robo platforms for retail clients and advisors, Betterment is expanding further into the asset management industry with a 401(k) offering for businesses.

"Many expect to continue working in retirement,” says Catherine Collinson, president of the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies.

With retirement savings plans directly in focus, the Labor Department is one step closer to implementing a new fiduciary standard whose scope heartens supporters and troubles critics.

Asset managers took lead roles to vehemently oppose the DoL's fiduciary standard proposal. In the course of the Department's hearings, some representatives fared better than others under scrutiny.

While most people in the retirement industry agree that the Department of Labor has its heart in the right place in wanting to protect individuals from conflicts of interest, many don’t believe the agency has gone about its rule-making in the right way.

A startup named FeeX says it has an automated service that calculates the fees in an old 401(k)s and recommends whether a rollover (and which kind) makes sense.

Not only are 403(b) retirement plans diversified, but the average cost of offering them decreased slightly from 2009 to 2012.

Generation Y is more conservative than other generations when it comes to retirement savings.

This list identifies 15 women influencing the broader fund provider industry and making a substantial impact on their organizations. All stand out for their unique leadership positions and for their propensity to help others rise in the field.

There's more ways for the mutual fund industry to cut costs, says Bill McNabb, chief executive officer and chairman of Vanguard.

In the case of the millennials, their experience with the financial sector includes the unifying themes of volatility, crisis and scandal.

For the first time, more than half of all 401(k) contributions will go into target-date funds, research firm Cerulli Associates estimates. It projects the assets in target-date funds to hit $2 trillion by 2019.

Many financial professionals are accepting the idea that they likely won't beat the market and that investors therefore would be better off in low-cost index funds.