Congruent Retirement Edge: Bringing Guaranteed Lifetime Income solutions to the DC marketplace
Today, participants are concerned about replacing their paycheck in retirement, leading many to delay retirement. Employers offering lifetime income options help employees boost confidence and create better outcomes (e.g., higher post-retirement income, reduced sequence-of-returns risk). To compete, recordkeepers are making available lifetime income solutions.
Bringing guaranteed lifetime income into retirement plans shouldn’t require one-off builds each time a solution is brought on to a recordkeeper’s platform. Yet today, integrating guaranteed lifetime income products into 401(k) plans remains a challenge due to legacy infrastructure, data fragmentation, and administrative complexity.
Retirement Edge is at the center of guaranteed lifetime income. Our microservice-based cloud-native architecture ensures flexibility and scalability to support any solution—Collective Investment Trusts, Target Date Funds, managed accounts, or standalones. We bring together all stakeholders:
- Recordkeepers & Custodians
- Insurance Carriers
- Managed Account Providers & Asset Managers
- Plan Sponsors & Advisors
- Participants
Beyond Middleware – Comprehensive Ecosystem Orchestration
Retirement Edge transcends traditional middleware to orchestrate the entire guaranteed lifetime income ecosystem. A single connection reduces integration burdens and enables Schwab to offer solutions through multiple carriers without straining your technology teams.
- Take responsibility for daily data/asset reconciliation and lifecycle management.
- Provide omnibus trading for non-NSCC annuities (functioning like ordinary CUSIPs).
- Serve as the single point of contact for smooth trade/dollar flow.
The Recordkeeper Challenges Using Guaranteed Lifetime Income:
Bespoke one-off Processes: Recordkeeping platforms weren’t built to support communication and file formats with providers of guaranteed lifetime income, requiring the creation of new files and new workflows.
With Retirement Edge, we make it easy to do it once and not have to do the heavy lift each time a new lifetime income solution is brought on board.
Fragmented trade and settlement processing: Different lifetime income solutions have different trade and settlement characteristics requiring bespoke trading rules. Additionally, participant data, plan provisions, and annuity contract details are handled in different ways from different solutions, complicating reconciliation and participant experiences.
With Retirement Edge, we take responsibility for daily data/asset reconciliation and lifecycle management. For non-NSCC traded solutions, we handle the omnibus trading, making the solution function like an ordinary CUSIP. We also serve as the single point of contact for smooth trade/dollar flow.
Limited Scalability: The lifetime income solutions will continue to evolve. as they have for decades in the retail market, making it almost guaranteed that new solutions will be introduced and may be added to a recordkeeper’s platform. Trying to maintain SSO integrations with each solution, having documents in different formats in different locations makes it a challenge to scale.
Working with us, adding a new solution becomes more of an administrative function and less of a technology lift which makes this reality much easier to deal with.
Why should a recordkeeper use middleware versus direct connection?
Using middleware like Retirement Edge offers several advantages for Schwab’s retirement plan services business compared to direct connections with income solution providers:
Simplified Integration
As demand for guaranteed lifetime income grows, plan sponsors are increasingly incorporating these solutions into their offerings. Middleware like Retirement Edge simplifies integration by connecting fragmented systems, data sets, and format requirements. This enables recordkeepers to offer multiple lifetime income solutions from various insurance carriers through a single connection, reducing the need for multiple integrations. By streamlining connectivity, Retirement Edge minimizes strain on a recordkeeper’s technology resources, eliminating the need for core development as the solution set expands. This allows development and technology teams to focus on core priorities while Congruent manages carrier connections and daily operations.
Further, Retirement Edge handles the regular maintenance required when connected to carriers, such as testing for carrier code migrations, IP address issues, firewall settings, and SFTP configurations. Middleware optimizes resources, saving time and effort for recordkeepers.
Enhanced Reconciliation Process
Congruent, unlike other middleware in the lifetime income space, assists in the reconciliation process and ensures that direct-traded or NSCC-traded annuities reconcile daily. One of the challenges with having multiple lifetime income solutions is being able to handle the reconciliation process. As the landscape evolves, it is important to partner with a company that can meet the needs now and has the modern technology, recordkeeping expertise, and commitment to continuously enhance its technology for tomorrow.
Consistent Communication and Data Management
Without a middleware partner, each time a lifetime income solution is brought into your system, there will need to be different messages going out to different carriers providing them with demographic information in different formats. Each carrier will be sending you back information for daily position updates for each participant in a different format and likely at a different time. The benefit information will be different and if you rely on their microsite, a different SSO will need to be established for each company. Participant documents will be in different locations and there will be more recordkeeper resources needed to manage all of that.
By leveraging middleware like Retirement Edge, recordkeepers can streamline operations, enhance the participant experience, and reduce the complexities associated with managing multiple direct connections to income solution providers. This ultimately leads to more efficient and effective retirement income solutions for all stakeholders involved
Pension Administration Software Provider | Congruent Solutions
Congruent Solution is a leading software and retirement plan administration services provider. We help plan providers, TPA’s deliver great CX to sponsors and participants. The Solution: Congruent Retirement Edge – Smart Middleware for Annuity Integration
Retirement Edge acts as a secure, intelligent bridge between stakeholders — standardizing data, automating workflows, and enabling end-to-end annuity lifecycle management within retirement plans.
How Retirement Edge Helps
– Multi-Provider Integration:
Seamlessly integrates with multiple annuity carriers, recordkeepers, and custodians through secure APIs and data exchanges.
– Automated Data Mapping & Reconciliation:
Transforms non-standard formats into a common language for participant, contract, and plan-level data — ensuring consistency and accuracy.
– Participant-Level Visibility:
Tracks annuity balances, conversions, income projections, and provider selections across plan populations.
– Plan Sponsor & Fiduciary Reporting:
Generates on-demand reports for fiduciary oversight, provider benchmarking, and policy statement compliance.
– Lifecycle Automation:
Supports the full annuity journey — from provider verification and product selection to income activation, payments, and post-retirement servicing.
– Plug-and-Play Deployment:
Built to complement existing recordkeeping infrastructure without forcing core system replacement.
Why Congruent?
With over 20 years in retirement technology, Congruent understands the operational pain points holding back annuity adoption — and Retirement Edge solves them with purpose-built architecture, clean data flows, and automation that scales.
Outcome: Enable Annuities Without the Operational Drag
– Accelerate annuity adoption across plans
– Reduce manual work and integration costs
– Deliver better participant retirement outcomes
– Strengthen fiduciary confidence and compliance
