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The Workers’ Wealth Lab was built on a simple idea: For those who have access to it, America’s retirement system has proven itself an extraordinary mechanism for building wealth. Now in its second year, the Lab aims to use the rails of the retirement system we have to scale what works. Working with fresh data and insights and alongside both product leaders and policymakers, we can take the tools, design features, and behavioral insights that work for higher-income savers and make them accessible to everyone. And where those tools fall short for low-to-moderate income workers, the Lab identifies opportunities to re-engineer them so they actually meet people where they are.

Backed by a first-of-its-kind database of more than 200,000 participants and their disaggregated retirement plan transactional data, the Lab is making one thing abundantly clear: Building a retirement and benefits system that works for all workers requires a special kind of time travel. We have to revisit old assumptions about plan design that we once treated as gospel, unwind the design choices that no longer serve today’s much more mobile workforce, and at the same time look ahead to anticipate the needs and realities of tomorrow’s savers. We have to go back to the future.

This year’s Lab embodied that spirit. Nearly 100 plan sponsors, recordkeepers, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and innovators convened to surface insights, pressure-test long-held beliefs, and help chart the path toward a new standard in retirement plan and benefits design—one built for the workers who need it most.

This report offers a synthesis of what we heard in each Lab station and what we need to explore next. 

This report was co-authored with DCIIA, with analysis from the Morningstar Center for Retirement and Policy Studies. We are grateful to TIAA Nuveen, Pontera, Addition Wealth, and JPMorgan Chase for their support of the Workers’ Wealth Lab event and this report.