Target-date fund managers evolve to capture burgeoning 401(k) market

For providers of target-date funds, it’s no longer enough to be a one-trick pony.

Over the last several years, TDF managers have engaged in a marketing bonanza of new products to stand out in an increasingly competitive — and lucrative — 401(k) marketplace.

Examples of such activity include providers launching funds with different investment strategies, investment vehicles and asset allocations, as well as coupling existing strategies with more passive management to drive down cost.

Take BlackRock Inc. Last month, the asset manager converted its LifePath Active TDF series into a smart-beta-focused series called LifePath Smart Beta, with an exposure of 80%-90% in underlying smart-beta exchange-traded funds.

BlackRock has the only existing TDFs touting smart-beta explicitly in their name, and has distinguished itself in a largely unoccupied market niche, according to Jeff Holt, multi-asset analyst at Morningstar Inc.

It’s the most recent of many examples of asset managers looking to differentiate to try capturing a piece of the roughly $860 billion target-date mutual fund market.

“[It’s now] more common to offer different flavors of a strategy or completely different strategies within a fund manager to suit the potential demands of different clients,” Mr. Holt said. “It wasn’t always like that.”

Research firm Cerulli Associates estimates TDFs will capture roughly 90% of all new 401(k) contributions by 2020. With such big money at stake, firms are trying to stand out.

Wells Fargo & Co. is another fairly recent example. In November last year, the firm expanded its TDF offering with its Dynamic Target series, which represents a vast departure from its Dow Jones Target funds in several respects, such as use of active management and a more aggressive glide path. It launched the Dow Jones series two decades ago.

Dimensional Fund Advisors came to market that same month with its first TDFs — the Target Date Retirement Income Funds — which use a liability-driven-investing strategy, investing heavily in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities.

Others such as BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Voya Financial and TIAA have debuted indexed series as companions to more actively managed ones, while Pacific Investment Management Company and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have launched active-passive blend strategies to push down fees in an increasingly cost-conscious 401(k) market.

In August, Charles Schwab launched an index series that, at 8 basis points, made it the lowest-cost provider on the market.

It’s also not uncommon to see firms diversify by offering strategies in both mutual funds and collective investment trust funds, to cater to different tastes, Mr. Holt said. State Street Global Advisors, for example, launched its TDFs in a mutual-fund wrapper in 2014, when its CITs had already been around for a decade.

And some, such as AllianceBernstein and Charles Schwab, have developed multi-manager series, which use various investment sub-advisers and present an alternative to series that invest strictly in underlying proprietary funds.

“I think the biggest driver of this is just the amount of assets flowing into these funds,” according to Sean Deviney, an adviser who heads the retirement plan group at Provenance Wealth Advisors. “That’s where every single [defined contribution investment only] wants to be. And that’s where all the DCIO wholesalers are focusing their attention, on their TDFs.”

DCIO refers to the divisions at asset management firms focusing on DC plans.

Indeed, if it weren’t for positive flows into target-date funds, firms such as T. Rowe Price and American Funds, which traditionally lean more on active management, would have had net redemptions at the firm level in 2015, according to Morningstar.

Asset managers’ increased focus on TDFs has led to some positive evolution in the market, through a reduction in fees and more focus on how a fund’s glide path (or, how a fund’s asset allocation changes over time) affects particular employee populations, Mr. Deviney said.

However, he believes some of the so-called differentiators touted by asset managers don’t add value beyond a traditional TDF.

“A lot of this stuff is a bunch of crap,” Mr. Deviney said. “It sounds fancy but isn’t adding much value beyond a traditional target-date fund; it’s just making some minor changes inside of them and calling it innovative.”

Such bells and whistles make it more difficult for plan advisers to complete due diligence with fund selections, especially when considering TDF benchmarking is already more complex than with other funds like large-cap funds.

Rather than pay attention to the “marketing” components, advisers should focus on understanding how the glide path changes over time, how that relates to an employee base, the diversification of underlying managers, performance and cost, Mr. Deviney said.