# Employees' and Agents' Pension Benefits Plan GWL&A Financial Inc.

Employees' and Agents' Pension Benefits Plan GWL&A Financial Inc. is a Pension Fund based in Greenwood Village, United States.

## Overview

- **Organization type:** Pension Fund
- **Headquarters:** Greenwood Village, United States
- **Region:** North America
- **Address:** Greenwood Village, CO, United States
- **Founded:** 1940
- **Assets under management:** Undisclosed
- **Website:** greatwestlife.com

## Regulatory record

- **Reports private funds:** No

## About

The Employees' and Agents' Pension Benefits Plan GWL&A Financial Inc. was established in 1940 to serve the workforce of Great-West Life & Annuity Insurance Company, a financial services firm that later evolved into Empower, the second-largest retirement plan provider in the United States. The plan's corporate sponsor is now part of Great-West Lifeco, the publicly traded Canadian holding company with approximately CAD 2.4 trillion in assets under administration (per Great-West Lifeco, 2024). The plan allocates primarily across private markets, with a disclosed strategy leaning toward buyout and mezzanine funds. This is the textbook liability-matching approach for a mature pension: prioritizing capital preservation and steady distribution yields over early-stage equity risk. The geographic mandate is predominantly North American, though the sponsor's parent operates across Canada, the U.S., and Europe, which occasionally surfaces cross-border co-investment opportunities. Team structure and exact deployment figures are not publicly disclosed. The plan operates from Greenwood Village, Colorado, the U.S. base for Empower. As a captive corporate pension rather than a public multi-employer fund, it does not publish detailed annual investment reports. Its governance sits under the Empower umbrella, with ultimate fiduciary oversight from the Great-West Lifeco board. No adjacent philanthropic vehicles or co-investment clubs are known to operate in tandem with the plan. Its structural differentiator is its corporate-parent relationship. The plan is not an independent institutional allocator fighting for attention. It serves a specific, aging liability pool inside a for-profit insurance enterprise. That means investment policy is tightly aligned with the parent's balance-sheet priorities and regulatory capital requirements — a posture that favors predictable, credit-sensitive private strategies over the aggressive endowment model. The plan exists to fund benefits, not to build a brand.

## Sectors

- Buyout
- Mezzanine
- Private Credit

## People

- Edmund F. Murphy III — President and CEO, Empower

## Questions

### What is the relationship between this plan and Empower?

The plan is a legacy defined-benefit vehicle for employees and agents of Great-West Life & Annuity Insurance Company. GWL&A's retirement business was rebranded as Empower, which is now the operating entity that administers the plan alongside its broader defined-contribution recordkeeping business. The plan remains a distinct pool of assets, but governance and staffing are integrated under the Empower structure, which itself is owned by Great-West Lifeco.

### Which sectors does the plan explicitly avoid?

No explicit sector exclusions are published. However, the plan's focus on buyout and mezzanine strategies implicitly screens out venture capital, early-stage technology, and speculative real estate development — asset classes where return profiles do not match the steady, income-oriented liability stream of a mature defined-benefit plan.

## Related profiles

- [Employees' And Agents' Pension Benefits Plan Empower Holdings, Inc.](https://altss.com/profile/employees-and-agents-pension-benefits-plan-empower-holdings-inc)
- [Employees Pension Fund of Akureyri](https://altss.com/profile/employees-pension-fund-of-akureyri)

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Last updated: 2026-08-11T02:43:31.692Z

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