Empower Retirement

Empower Retirement is a subsidiary of Great-West Lifeco Inc., a publicly traded financial services holding company headquartered in Canada. Great-West Lifeco is itself majority-controlled by Power Corporation of Canada, a diversified management and holding company closely associated with the Desmarais family. This ownership structure places Empower inside one of Canada's largest financial conglomerates.

Empower grew primarily through acquisitions. It consolidated the US retirement businesses already owned by its parent Great-West Lifeco in 2014, then acquired the JP Morgan Retirement Plan Services book earlier that year. The firm's participant base effectively doubled with the 2019 purchase of MassMutual's retirement-plan business, and it added another 4.3 million participants through the 2022 acquisition of Prudential's full-service retirement unit.

Empower operates a largely open-architecture recordkeeping platform, meaning plan sponsors can select funds from a wide range of external asset managers. However, Putnam Investments — a large asset manager also owned by Great-West Lifeco — supplies proprietary target-date funds, managed accounts, and other investment products onto the Empower platform. The governance structure requires fiduciary oversight to avoid self-dealing, but the cross-selling channel exists.

Empower reports assets under administration (AUA), which measures the total value of participant accounts for which it provides recordkeeping and administrative services but does not actively manage. That figure stood at roughly $1.5 trillion after the Prudential acquisition closed in 2022. Empower also manages a smaller subset of those assets through its managed-account solutions, proprietary funds, and advisory services, but it is not primarily an asset manager — its economics are driven by per-participant recordkeeping fees and plan-level administration charges.

Empower administers a broad spectrum of defined-contribution and defined-benefit plans: 401(k) and 403(b) plans, 457 deferred-compensation plans for government and non-profit employers, IRA custodial accounts, and legacy pension plan recordkeeping. Its plan-sponsor base ranges from small businesses to large corporates, public school systems, and healthcare organizations.

Edmund F. Murphy III serves as President and CEO with overall strategic authority. Investment-product development and managed-account decisions are influenced by Putnam Investments as an affiliated asset manager, but plan-level investment menus are typically determined by plan-sponsor fiduciaries with Empower acting as the administrative platform, not the discretionary manager.

Empower's ultimate parent is Power Corporation of Canada, a holding company long controlled by the Desmarais family. Through Great-West Lifeco, the Desmarais interests hold significant influence over Empower's strategic direction, though day-to-day US retirement operations are run independently from Greenwood Village, Colorado.