For many households, workplace retirement accounts such as 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and 457s represent the single largest financial asset. Yet, until recently, those accounts have been out of reach for financial advisors while participants remain employed. Advisors might track balances or factor them loosely into planning conversations, but true management of the assets is left untouched until the participant retires or changes jobs.
Absolute Capital Management has spent decades building solutions to close that gap. The firm’s Workplace Investment Navigator (W.I.N.) platform gives advisors the ability to actively manage client retirement plan accounts before rollover. By expanding the investment universe beyond limited plan menus, enabling direct billing from accounts, and ensuring compliant integration, the firm turns what used to be an off-limits asset into a source of both client value and advisor growth.
In an interview with The Wealth Advisor’s Scott Martin, Alex Barned, National Sales Director at Absolute Capital, explains how advisors are increasingly recognizing the opportunity. “If we rolled the clock back five years, it always seemed like advisors were going, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know that existed,’” he says. “The great part of all of that time spent getting out there, telling the story is starting to pay off because now advisors at least have heard something about it.”
From Awareness to Adoption
For years, Barned and his team have been educating advisors about what pre-rollover management means. Many assumed it was either impermissible or too cumbersome to pursue. Today, adoption is gaining traction, thanks to several structural advantages built into Absolute Capital’s platform.
First, compliance is addressed. Advisors often worry that managing retirement accounts while participants are still working could expose them to unnecessary risk. Barned is clear that the structure is sound: recordkeepers back the activity, and chief compliance officers at firms have embraced the process.
Second, clients receive a far more robust investment experience than with a typical plan lineup. “We’re providing the client securities and active management that they didn’t have before,” Barned explains. “If you think about clients, they have 15 or so funds. We’re not limited to any of that. The bandwidth is so much bigger.” Opening the menu to vastly more investment vehicles can transform the potential of accounts that had previously been stuck with narrow choices.
Finally, operational friction is minimized. Advisors do not need to build new processes or add administrative layers. Absolute Capital executes trades and even deducts fees directly from the retirement account. Taken together, says Barned, “there’s a little bit of a wow factor, and it’s starting to sink in to a lot more advisors.”
Why Pre-Rollover Matters for Clients
From the client’s perspective, the benefits of pre-rollover management are equally compelling. Most participants are unaware that their accounts can be managed while they are still working. “To be able to fix that is kind of a big deal,” Barned notes, reflecting on how limiting it can feel to see a lifetime’s worth of savings constrained to a short list of mutual funds.
By giving clients professional management in accounts that may represent the majority of their wealth, advisors can deliver tangible value where it matters most. Traditional workplace plans often limit participants to 10–20 funds. Barned points out the irony: “Imagine the reaction if an advisory firm told a new hire that their entire investment platform consisted of just 15 mutual funds. You’d kind of chuckle,” he says. “But that’s what we’ve basically done from a regulatory side of the industry to the American working public.” Absolute Capital breaks through restrictive fund limitations, giving participants access to thousands of equities, ETFs, and other funds they otherwise couldn’t reach.
For many workers, the defined contribution plan is the foundation of retirement security. By integrating those assets into a broader strategy, advisors can create continuity across taxable accounts, IRAs, and workplace savings plans.
The Last Untapped Asset Pool
Advisors are increasingly aware of the competitive advantage pre-rollover management can provide. Barned calls these workplace accounts “the last basket of untapped wealth management assets out there.” The numbers bear that out.
“Of those $4 trillion worth of assets, our last data point says, of all the accounts that exist to make up that number, 0.62 of 1% is the amount of accounts that currently have an advisor attached to them,” he says. “So, with 99% and change left to go, I hope more advisors begin to realize that, hey, this is good for my business.”
The near-total lack of advisor presence creates a unique environment for identifying potential clients. “For those who are prospecting, it’s an interesting concept because there’s no advisor on the other side. You don’t have to take anything away from anybody,” Barned explains. “From our prospecting advisors, they’ve come to find that that’s a little easier because they don’t need to break up what might be a 10-plus-year relationship.”
Growth-minded advisors might consider pre-rollover management a rare opening because displacing incumbents can be a slow and difficult process. In contrast, approaching workplace accounts introduces a clean slate. Advisors can meet participants where they are, add immediate value, and potentially capture rollover assets down the line.
Direct-to-Participant Efficiency
One of Absolute Capital’s most significant differentiators is its streamlined approach to account management. Rather than navigating complex relationships with plan sponsors, consultants, and recordkeepers, advisors work directly with individual participants—eliminating many traditional barriers associated with retirement plan consulting. The approach is starkly simplistic.
“You’re going straight to the participant,” Barned points out. The direct model eliminates the lengthy negotiations and complex stakeholder management that characterize traditional plan-level consulting. “Turnaround time, sales cycle is two weeks not two years,” he adds.
The participant-centric approach aims to accelerate growth and makes adoption practical for advisors at firms of all sizes. Whether serving a handful of households or running a scaled practice, advisors have the opportunity to integrate workplace management without reinventing their client engagement model.
A Win for Clients and Advisors
The impact on client relationships can be immediate. Advisors report a consistent reaction when they introduce the service, according to Barned. “The most common comment we hear back is the client goes, ‘I didn’t even know you could do that for me. Sign me up.’”
Clients gain the help they often don’t realize exists. “You consistently see out there what the clients want. They want help,” he says. “They now get somebody who’s going to give them a little help, so I think that’s the happy part.”
The business impact is just as important. By managing workplace assets, advisors may generate fee-based revenue, strengthen retention, and improve practice valuation. Participants who receive comprehensive advice on workplace accounts are less likely to roll assets to competing advisors when changing jobs. “You close the back door. You get the wallet and help the client, so you definitely got that win-win component to it there,” Barned notes. “Now it’s just a matter of advisors going, ‘Okay, how do I begin to do this? How do we incorporate it? How do we compliantly incorporate it?’ And that’s kind of the fun part of the conversations.”
Expanding the Prospecting Pool
Absolute Capital’s service also aims to expand an advisor’s reach to clients who were historically overlooked. High-earning, not-rich-yet (HENRY) households often accumulate significant workplace balances in their 30s and 40s but lack sufficient taxable assets to interest large wirehouses.
“Now you have a reason to go and work with these people, and go ahead and get them in the mix,” explains Barned. He points to sectors such as technology, law, and medicine where younger professionals rapidly build balances. “There are 30-somethings who have grown a substantial 401(k) or 457 balance in a shockingly short period of time,” he says. “They’ve max funded. They’ve had great matches. These are not insignificant accounts for 30-somethings.”
By engaging younger, often overlooked households early, advisors can build relationships that last decades, capturing fee-based revenue today while positioning for rollover events tomorrow. This strategy enables advisors to benefit from the natural growth of client wealth, often decades before competitors even consider the same prospects.
“This does have many attributes from a business growth perspective,” Barned emphasizes. “Whether you’re growing from your existing book, traditional organic sales, or if you’re going to an expansion mode, a lot of attributes to go ahead and open up a market—where, again, most critically, there’s no advisor on the other side—is probably the most critical win because it makes this faster. You’re not prying something away.”
Seamless Integration with Advisor Business Models
Barned highlights that his firm is designed as an advisor-first partner, not a competitor. Advisors who already use TAMPs for taxable accounts can integrate Absolute Capital’s workplace solutions without disruption.
“We are an advisor-driven solution, so when there’s a break in service, the advisor can do whatever they want,” observes Barned. “We’ll make that seamless for both client and advisor, but we are completely there, whatever the advisor’s business is, we’re there to support it, and obviously, being able to seamlessly roll it over is a great plus.”
In addition to workplace management, Absolute Capital maintains a robust TAMP platform for nonqualified and IRA assets. “Lots of very cool things there for that particular solution set, and growing every day, so always excited to tell a story,” Barned adds.
The breadth of offerings means advisors can rely on Absolute Capital as a comprehensive partner across client accounts, while retaining full control of how they want to structure relationships.
Positioning for the Future
As workplace accounts increasingly factor into comprehensive wealth management, managing all aspects of a client’s portfolio—including pre-rollover retirement assets—may soon move from advantage to expectation. Absolute Capital’s message to advisors is clear: workplace assets no longer need to sit unmanaged until rollover. The tools exist to compliantly, efficiently, and profitably integrate those accounts into the financial plan today.
Barned sees momentum building, but plenty of opportunity remains. With less than 1% of workplace accounts currently attached to an advisor, the space is wide open for those willing to act. For advisors focused on growth, client value, and practice durability, the time to incorporate workplace management is now.
As Barned concludes, advisors can easily learn more and get started: “Steady advisor listening, abscap.com, book a call, upper right corner.”
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Additional Resources
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Disclosures
This was not a paid endorsement. The Firm does compensate The Wealth Advisor for other marketing purposes. Past performance is not to be considered indicative of future performance. Any investment contains risk including the risk of total loss. There is no assurance that the objectives of strategies offered by the Firm will be achieved or successful. Asset allocation and diversification do not guarantee a profit or protect against a loss. For additional information about Absolute Capital Management, visit their website at www.abscap.com or call 888-388-8303.
