The retirement industry has asked the same question for years: “How do we get more people retirement-ready?”
We’ve spent decades building products, designing plans, and improving access to investment options, but if we’re being honest, the results have been uneven at best. Participation rates remain stagnant in too many segments. Millions of workers, especially those in lower-wage or non-traditional jobs, still have no realistic path to long-term financial security.
Why? Because we’ve been trying to solve a distribution problem with a portfolio mindset.
The truth is that retirement readiness doesn’t begin with asset allocation or fund selection. It starts with the paycheck. Until we acknowledge that, we’ll keep designing systems that work well for those already inside them – and poorly for everyone else.
For high earners with financial advisors and steady incomes, planning for retirement is often a matter of optimization. Maximize contributions. Rebalance regularly. Take advantage of tax strategies. It’s about refinement.
But for the majority of American workers, the barrier isn’t portfolio management, it’s consistent, automated saving in the first place.
If someone doesn’t have access to a workplace retirement plan or isn’t sure how to open an IRA, telling them to “diversify early” or “watch your expense ratios” misses the point entirely. It’s like offering a playbook to someone who hasn’t been given a seat on the field.
The most effective way to bring more people into the retirement system isn’t through better products, it’s through seamless payroll integration. That’s the gateway. It’s where true inclusion begins.
When saving for retirement is automated directly from payroll, participation goes up. Barriers go down. People don’t have to navigate complex account setup processes, chase paperwork, or worry about missing a contribution. It just happens quietly, consistently, and sustainably.
That kind of frictionless experience is the baseline standard in other parts of life. We expect bills to autopay, subscriptions to renew, and transfers to happen in real time. Retirement savings should be no different.
True inclusion means designing systems that work for everyone, not just those with extra money to invest.
Freelancers, hourly workers, part-time staff, gig economy participants – these individuals often live without access to employer-sponsored retirement plans. But they do have income. And where income exists, there’s an opportunity to save, if the system is built to support it.
By embedding savings into payroll, we stop asking people to self-navigate a complicated industry and instead bring the solution to them, where they already are – earning a paycheck.
Behavioral research has shown that when retirement saving is optional, participation lags. When it’s automatic, participation significantly increases.
Auto-enrollment and payroll-based savings tap into that insight. They reduce the number of decisions people have to make in the moment and allow financial wellness to grow quietly in the background of their lives.
But auto-enrollment isn’t just a nice-to-have feature, it’s a core strategy for closing the access gap. And that’s what payroll integration enables at scale.
We now have the tools to make this vision real. API-based payroll integrations. Real-time contribution updates. Embedded financial tools that fit inside existing employer and employee workflows.
But tech alone isn’t enough. We also need to rethink how we frame participation. Instead of saying, “Here’s a retirement product you should consider,” we need to be saying, “Saving for the future is part of getting paid.”
That one shift – from product to process – changes everything.
For providers and plan sponsors, this isn’t just an altruistic play. It’s a long-term growth strategy.
The more people who participate early and consistently, even in small amounts, the more assets under management grow over time. A $50 paycheck deduction today becomes thousands in contributions over a career. And those participants are more likely to engage, refer others, and remain loyal to platforms that made saving feel easy.
If we want to close the retirement gap, we have to meet people at the point of income, not after. We need to shift from portfolio thinking to paycheck thinking. From optimizing for the few to building for the many.
Because real readiness doesn’t begin with charts or fund lineups. It starts the moment someone earns a dollar and sees that saving a piece of it is not only possible, but expected, easy, and built into the way work is done.
The paycheck is the gateway. It’s where equity begins. And it’s where the future of retirement must take root.