Kourtney Gibson

Company: TIAATitle: Chief Executive Officer, TIAA Retirement SolutionsIndustry: Financials and InsuranceNotable in 2024: Gibson nearly quadrupled the assets in TIAA's most popular lifetime income offer, known as RetirePlus.

In tackling what's often referred to as America's retirement savings crisis, TIAA plays a major role. The asset management giant's retirement products, offered through TIAA Retirement Solutions, account for nearly $900 billion of the the firm's $1.4 trillion in assets, working with 15,000 retirement plan sponsors and millions of employees across major professional fields to meet long-term financial goals.

At the head of Retirement Solutions is CEO Kourtney Gibson, a financial services industry veteran with decades of experience prior to joining TIAA in 2022 working with institutional clients across the globe. Now working alongside TIAA CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett, the two represent Black female leadership at the highest level of the U.S. money management business, and at a firm with over a century of history building retirement income security for working Americans.

Since 1918, TIAA estimates it has paid out more than $590 billion in annuity income to American retirees. It shared $5 billion with participants in 2023.

The concept of guaranteed retirement income, in particular, has become a major focus in recent years as Americans who are living longer worry more about the long-term solvency of Social Security. These concerns have risen after decades during which the traditional employee pension plan has been all but eliminated from the retirement savings landscape, with much greater onus on workers to save for themselves in market-based 401(k) accounts tied to performance of stocks and bonds.

The tenuous situation many Americans find themselves in when it comes to know they will have enough for their retirement years led TIAA to create a new retirement product series combining the now-standard target-date fund approach to retirement investing with the guarantee of lifetime income – TIAA RetirePlus, as well as other related options, such as the Nuveen (an asset management subsidiary of TIAA) Lifecycle Income series which can convert a traditional retirement investment portfolio to a guaranteed income option.

Offering the income stream, in effect an annuity alongside a diversified investment account, is an approach that will continue to grow in the years ahead. TIAA survey data of retirement plan sponsors shows 85% saying that employees can't rely on Social Security for income needs, and 59% citing the uncertainty related to the government program as the top factor pushing them towards adding annuity streams to retirement plans.

The rapid growth of assets in the RetirePlus series proves the market need. The company says total assets in these accounts have quadrupled since Gibson was hired, now reaching a total of $51 billion in assets in over 600,000 individual accounts across over 600 institutional clients.

Gibson's team more than doubled the number of plan sponsors with lifetime income in their default options in the last two years. In January, the TIAA and Nuveen next generation target-date lifetime income strategies across corporate, educational, governmental, and healthcare retirement plans surpassed one million accounts, also doubling, in under a year.

Gibson's long-time success in the financial industry has led her to multiple posts on the boards of major corporations, from Lululemon to FIS (whose current CEO Stephanie Ferris is also a 2025 CNBC Changemaker). She also served on the board of her alma mater, the University of Miami.