By Randy Myers
The stable value landscape has changed over the past two decades. The asset class is no longer the automatic default for new contributions to retirement plan accounts, and baby boomers are drawing down balances as they segue into retirement. One senior executive recently likened stable value to a “melting glacier.” Against that backdrop, panelists at the 2025 SVIA Fall Forum outlined practical ways the stable value providers can capitalize on current retirement-industry trends and remain a valuable resource for retirement plan participants.
Neena Saxena, head of stable value investments at Vanguard Group, kicked off the discussion and introduced the panel: moderator Eitan Gazit, vice president, institutional markets, at Prudential Financial; Vibhor Dave, senior investment strategist at Vanguard; Brenda St. Arnaud, senior managing director of product development for TIAA; and Simon Poole, vice president of stable value products at Empower.
Even as the stable value industry seeks new opportunities, Poole urged his audience not to lose sight of the basics and what has and hasn’t changed. Stable value’s core promise—capital preservation with steady returns—has not changed, he said, and wrap capacity remains available. But the advent of target-date funds and managed accounts has reshaped participant behavior and cash flows into and out of the product. As additional product innovations come to market, Poole encouraged the industry to stay alert to opportunities, including in 529 college-savings plans and health-savings accounts. He also urged firms to use artificial intelligence in their internal operations to streamline product management and allow teams to focus on the “hard parts” of stable value rather than administrative tasks.
Using stable value in accumulation
While acknowledging growing interest in products that help retirees generate income from savings, St. Arnaud reminded the audience that stable value still has a vital role to play during the accumulation phase of retirement savings—even if that role is evolving to facilitate the transition to decumulation and income generation. Recent examples, she said, include TIAA’s placing of stable value and fixed annuities inside default investment solutions such as managed accounts and certain target-date structures, where they can serve as a bond replacement inside the fixed-income sleeve. Last year, for instance, TIAA’s Secure Income Account stable value product was incorporated into new target-date collective investment trust offerings from Empower. On its own recordkeeping platform, TIAA offers a proprietary product called TIAA RetirePlus, a managed account program that can include guaranteed lifetime income. More than one million account holders in more than 1,000 plans are using these products, which collectively hold approximately $15 billion in stable value assets, St. Arnaud said.
At Vanguard, Dave said, they are framing retirement-income-focused managed accounts and target-date structures around three building blocks: a multi-asset allocation for growth, an income-funding sleeve within the investment portfolio that builds exposure to annuities, and annuities themselves. Stable value, he said, can really add value in the second of those building blocks by helping to keep a participant’s assets relatively steady while they accrue mortality credits. Stability is important, he said, because it ensures that participants have the time and resources needed to evaluate the trade-offs involved when it comes time to convert savings to income.
Designs for the spending phase
Investment managers have a variety of options to choose from when selecting annuities for their income-funding strategies, Dave said, including deferred annuities, qualified longevity annuity contracts, and variable annuities with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. Most of those products allow investors to choose when and how much to annuitize. Participant outcomes will depend on the annuity type used along with a participant’s preference for consumption versus wealth accumulation. Fixed annuities could help provide stable consumption while designs using variable annuities may allow more growth potential in the income-funding sleeve, he said, but overall “plan sponsors have a lot more options to choose from compared to what they had maybe five or ten years back.”
Prudential is championing yet another approach to generating retirement income, one in which it uses stable value, combined with a drawdown annuity, within target-date funds.
“Whatever amount (participants) choose to protect goes into stable value and they have, say, 20 to 25 years to deplete it,” Gazit said. “The better returns are on stable value, the more they’ll draw down over their life. The worse returns are, the less they’ll draw down. But they know … the stable value returns are always positive.”
Adoption and messaging
Asked how receptive clients are to adding income solutions to retirement plans, Poole called it a “mixed bag.” Some advisors, he said, have had “SECURE Act overload” and aren’t ready to add “income or paycheck solutions,” while others are interested—especially when shown early-adoption data.
“It’s not the thing that is always going to be front conversation… but it gets some airtime,” he said.
St. Arnaud said TIAA continues to see meaningful demand for guaranteed income among 403(b) participants at retirement.
“Our statistics are that one in three people at the point of retirement are using a pure annuitization,” she said, noting that figure does not include use of guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits.
Poole reiterated that advisor interest varies and that education is critical to improving receptivity and outcomes.
“Whether it’s … full-scale advice for those that can afford it or making that advice more accessible through artificial intelligence or some other mechanism … [education] is going to be critical in terms of helping people retire in comfort,” he said.
Dave agreed, arguing that sponsor and consultant education must evolve alongside newer product designs. “Some of the performance metrics that have been traditionally used to evaluate retirement-savings vehicles like target-date funds don’t work for these new products,” he said.
A closing “to-do” list
In brief closing reflections, panelists offered practical takeaways.
“There is definitely a need for us to focus more on education for plan sponsors and consultants,” Dave reiterated.
Beyond educating clients, St. Arnaud added that the industry needs to engage them by making that education accessible and understandable.
“We surveyed 3,500 adults and only 12% of those people had strong financial literacy,” she noted. “We can make … education available, but how do we make it meet people where they are and allow them to engage with it? How do we keep it simple?”
One way to forge deeper connections, she suggested, is by using metaphors—such as referring to the idea of using savings to create a “paycheck” in retirement rather than telling people it’s time to “decumulate” their assets.
Poole also underscored the need to make guidance more widely available and in more formats—including via artificial intelligence—because “one size fits all… is never going to happen and it shouldn’t happen. Everyone’s different, everyone’s needs are going to be different.”
In summary, the panel offered a simple message: stable value’s basic promise still resonates, and the toolkit to deploy it—within default investment options, alongside income features, and as a liquid reserve in retirement—continues to expand. The work now is to match those tools to plan designs and participant needs, and to communicate about them in terms that resonate with plan sponsors and participants.