July 2020

Defaults may be the most powerful force in product design. 

Google paid Apple an estimated $12 billion to remain the iPhone’s default search engine. Consumer subscriptions from local gyms to HBO depend on you paying, and sometimes forgetting about, default monthly fees. A similar dynamic has taken hold in the capital markets.

The United States is the largest retirement market in the world, and it has undergone a titanic shift in the past decade as a result of a new default product.

From Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution

US households have approximately $32 trillion in retirement savings, comprising about 1/3 of all US household financial assets. The government encourages savings through tax advantages. Although individuals can create their own retirement accounts, employers direct the majority of retirement assets. 

The leading retirement products are defined benefit (DB) plans, defined contribution (DC) plans, IRAs, and annuities. I’m going to focus on the first two. Defined benefit plans (typically pensions) feature guaranteed payouts from employers to retired employees. In DB plans, employers bear the risk that future investment returns won’t cover the future retirement dollars promised to employees. Defined contribution plans (e.g. a 401(k) or a 403(b)) place the burden of saving and investing onto employees. In DC plans, employers do not guarantee a set payout to employees.

Fig 1. US total retirement market assets ($ trillions)

For obvious reasons, employers prefer defined contribution plans over defined benefit plans. Since 2010, private employers have directed virtually all new retirement assets to DC plans (dark blue in Fig 1) and virtually none to DB plans (yellow in Fig 1). Since 2000, most Fortune 500 companies have discontinued the DB plans once available to their employees.

Fig 2. Most Fortune 500 companies have stopped offering DB plans

But if we shift the responsibility for saving and investing onto employees, what if they don’t save enough for retirement? 

A New Default

The solution was to create a default product. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 created Qualified Default Investment Alternatives (QDIAs) with two major features: (1) employers can enroll employees into a third-party-managed defined contribution plan and (2) employers are not liable for future investment performance. QDIAs also auto-escalate – an employee’s default contribution automatically increases every year. In plain English, employers get out of the investment business, and the employee can’t sue the employer if the QDIA underperforms.

The most popular QDIA is called a Target-Date Fund (TDF) -- QDIAs are so closely tied to Target-Date Funds that many retirement researchers I spoke with use the terms interchangeably. Vanguard is the largest player in this space, so let’s use their data as the canonical example.

Fig 3. Defined Contribution plans shifting into Target-Date Funds

Currently, TDFs comprise 37% of all Vanguard DC plan assets and receive 60% of new contributions. 54% of Vanguard’s DC plan participants are only invested in a single TDF (dark blue in Fig 3). In five years, that number will be 70%. That’s it. That single default Target-Date Fund will be that person’s entire retirement plan. 

The Pipeline to Passive

In sum, Vanguard gathers retirement assets from employees enrolled by default and then invests those assets into Vanguard’s own passive investment funds. The end result: a monumental capital flow from US retirement schemes into passive investment vehicles. Other major TDF players work the same way

Fig 4. The Default Path from US Retirement into Passive Funds

Fundamental investors who study the mechanics of those capital flows should be able to find repeatable buying windows and selling opportunities in today’s markets. But first, we need to examine how these Target-Date Funds allocate to passive funds and how that dynamic is shifting too. That will be the topic for our next segment.

Special thanks to the research staff at the Investment Company Institute, the Federal Reserve, the Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives, and Vanguard for their help with this piece.