2026 RPAG National Conference: Inside the Conversations That Shaped the Week

RPAG’s 2026 National Conference, held September 13–15 in Dana Point, California, brought together leading retirement plan advisors under this year’s theme: adVantage Point. From its position at the center of the retirement ecosystem, RPAG sees the challenges and opportunities facing advisors, asset managers, and recordkeepers in a way few others can, and the sessions were designed to share that view, helping advisors see more clearly into market trends, evaluate products and providers, deepen client relationships, and leave with tools to grow their practices.

Robert Barnett, President and CEO of Great Gray Group, reinforced that RPAG’s evolution is intentional and ongoing — the name was almost Retirement Plan Advisor Platform, but Group was chosen intentionally. The collective power of every advisor in that network is the investment thesis, and what emerged across three days reflected it: demographic shifts changing who advisors serve and who they compete against, structural changes in the investment landscape opening doors that were recently closed, and a growing imperative to design practices that can grow, transfer, and compete without depending entirely on the advisor at the center.

Below are some of the top takeaways advisors left with.

The platform is evolving and advisors are driving it.

Isabelle Blankmeyer’s product session covered three areas of active investment:

• PAL data quality: A formal recordkeeper scoring framework is being introduced, with nine major recordkeeping partners already engaged, to improve the accuracy and completeness of plan data advisors rely on every day.
• Prospecting workflows: New workflows will bring 5500 data directly into a pitch-ready experience — search for plans, surface key details, and generate a presentation-ready summary without manual assembly.
• Platform architecture: Investments in a modernized frontend, a bidirectional Partner Integration Layer API, and AI-driven security enhancements are designed to make the platform faster, more reliable, and more connected to the other tools in an advisor’s tech stack.

Each of these investments points to the same goal: better data, less friction, and faster delivery for advisors.

Your next client will evaluate you differently than your last one.

April Rudin, CEO and Founder of The Rudin Group, opened her keynote with a direct challenge: many advisors have built excellent practices for an industry that’s about to look meaningfully different. A digitally native workforce is entering DC plans with different expectations. Approximately $124 trillion in assets is projected to transfer through 2048, reshaping who sits across from you in plan settings.¹ And roughly 105,000 advisors are expected to retire within the next decade, representing 41.4% of industry assets, which is both a capacity gap and, for advisors who are ready, a significant growth opportunity.² The advisors who treat it as a design problem now, asking who their team is, who their clients are, and how their practice is built, will have more options than the ones who wait.

The DC plan private markets gap is closing, and the infrastructure to do it right is here.

During their session, Jeff Elvander of RPAG and Gary Gallagher, President of iCapital, announced a new partnership between Great Gray Trust Company and iCapital to develop a suite of CITs across private equity, private credit, and private real assets, purpose-built for defined contribution plans.³ The backdrop they set is hard to ignore: state and local pension plans allocate roughly 22% to private markets, while most DC plans allocate zero, and private companies now represent 81% of global companies with revenues over $100 million.⁴ The DOL’s proposed rule on fiduciary duties in selecting designated investment alternatives creates a clearer pathway and defensible safe harbor for sponsors who engage it thoughtfully. Advisors who understand both the investment case and the governance framework will be positioned to lead that conversation before their clients start asking for it.

BlackRock’s Nick Nefouse connected a related point: the profession has largely solved accumulation, and the next frontier is decumulation. With target date funds now representing 42% of 401(k) assets, up from 8% in 2007,⁵ the innovations defining the next generation of DC investing include active management, private assets, custom target date solutions, and lifetime income. For advisors, the frame worth adopting with plan sponsor clients is simple. Success is no longer measured by account balances. It’s measured by retirement outcomes.

The market is constructive. Knowing how to explain that is part of the job.

Fidelity’s Brad Pineault offered a Q3 2026 market framework worth understanding, because plan sponsors are asking these questions. The short version: the investment landscape is more constructive than many expected. The U.S. is mid-cycle, corporate earnings are solid, and artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to generate real productivity gains across multiple sectors. But headwinds are real too: sticky inflation above the Fed’s 2% target, geopolitical uncertainty, and the historically defensive behavior of equities in midterm election years. His portfolio framework for advisors:

• Lean into AI-driven growth themes
• Broaden exposure to cyclical companies whose fundamentals support the economic backdrop
• Use fixed income and alternatives to manage volatility

On AI’s role in active equity investing specifically, Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Sarah Rich made a point worth passing along: the real edge isn’t processing speed. It’s what AI can read that traditional analysis misses entirely, including earnings call audio, patent filings, supply chain linkages, and investor sentiment buried in unstructured data. When evaluating active managers who claim an AI advantage, ask whether they have the experience, infrastructure, and human capital to apply it responsibly.

Your practice is only as valuable as it is transferable.

This theme came up in multiple forms across the conference. The most direct version: the advisors who spend their careers helping clients build financial futures often have no succession plan of their own. Chris Hall and buyAUM’s Andrew Mirolli framed it as three questions tied to three career inflection points. At 50: can your business grow without requiring more of you? At 60, the “90-Day Test,” what would break if you disappeared for 90 days? At 70: could someone else inherit the trust you’ve built? By the time you’re asking that last question, the decisions are mostly already made.

Capital Group’s Jonathan Young made a related point from a team-building angle: practices don’t scale by working more hours. They scale through role clarity, documented processes, scorecards, and deliberate investment in the next generation of talent. With a projected shortage of 90,000 to 110,000 advisors over the next decade, driven by retirements outpacing new recruiting, building a practice that next-generation professionals actually want to join isn’t a nice-to-have.⁶ It’s how you compete.

Your value proposition might be your biggest untapped asset.

T. Rowe Price’s Emily Barczak made a simple observation: most advisors describe what they do in language their clients don’t use or connect to. Terms like “holistic planning” and “portfolio management” don’t resonate the way “financial security,” “stability,” or “peace of mind” do. Her data on prospect segments is worth knowing: 73% of heirs plan to change advisors after a wealth transfer,⁷ and 69% of women are the primary financial decision-maker in their households.⁸ Prospecting plan sponsors requires understanding who the actual buyer is, what’s motivating them to consider a change, and what’s happening inside their organization.

On the marketing side, TJ Lund walked through how Everhart Advisors used RPAG’s Marketing Accelerator to find and articulate what makes them genuinely different. The insight that travels beyond the case study is simple: every client touchpoint is either reinforcing who you are or quietly undermining it. A governing brand idea, one clear point of view that runs through everything, is what separates marketing that feels coherent from marketing that feels assembled. To learn more about how RPAG’s Marketing Accelerator program helps advisors take their marketing to the next level, reach out at support@rpag.com.

Resources and session materials from the 2026 RPAG National Conference are available to RPAG members in the Resource Center.