Mariner’s New Growth Engine

Every Filing in Scope, Ranked

How Mariner put an AI Workforce on the nationwide plan universe, and why its Institutional team now starts at the top of the list.

Companies that sponsor a retirement plan file a Form 5500 with the Department of Labor every year, and those filings are public. There are approximately 850,000 annual filings. Anyone can see who has a plan, how big it is, and other details about how it is run. Win one and you gain institutional assets, a corporate relationship, and a potential path to the underlying households.

The catch is that a filing tells you a plan exists. It does not tell you whether the plan might be worth a call. So firms qualify plans by hand, one at a time, and work the few that arrive by referral.

Mariner used to work that way too. Now it chooses.

The Constraint

Form 5500 data is not scarce. About 850,000 private-sector plans file every year, every filing is public, and vendors have sold cleaned, pre-scored versions to advisors for decades at a few thousand dollars a year. Any competitor can buy the same list.

A bought list does not inherently know which plans Mariner already advises or inherently rank plans on Mariner’s definition of a plan worth pursuing. And it cannot tell you what a filing might be omitting: small plans file a short form with no service-provider disclosure at all, so a plan that names no advisor may still have one. Identifying a real prospect meant a handful of lookups across three systems, one plan at a time.

Nobody could reasonably do that 850,000 times. So, Mariner’s Institutional team worked the plans that reached it through relationships and referrals. That won business, but a strong unread plan and a weak one look exactly alike.

How It Works

Mariner set the scope at the nationwide plan universe rather than a segment the team could already reach. The AI Workforce was trained on Mariner’s criteria and reading filings within a weekend. It screens out the plans Mariner already advises, ranks what is left, and attaches a named contact to each one. The Institutional team starts at the top of the list.

For each filing it does four things. It screens out any plan Mariner already advises. It separates plans with a disclosed incumbent from plans where the filing is silent, because open ground and displacement are different conversations. It ranks each group on Mariner’s markers of what may be a poorly served plan. Then it enriches each ranked plan with what the filing leaves out, including a named contact and how the plan’s fees compare to its peers.

The criteria are Mariner’s. They are applied to every plan the same way, and they change when Mariner’s view of an attractive opportunity changes. Coverage grows as the AI Workforce reads further into the market, and new filings post all year, so the ranking rebuilds as they land.

The Playbook

Every firm in this market can see the same 850,000 filings. Mariner is reading them, because it put an AI Workforce on work the firm was never going to staff. A team of people could not have taken this on at any headcount Mariner would have approved, and the reading and ranking now runs continuously.

“This is the front end of the growth engine. We’re seeing opportunities the team never had the hours to look for, and there’s a lot more of it out there. Retirement plans are just the starting point. Eventually every market we want to compete in is one we can see, prioritize, and aim to win.” Bryan Bakardjiev, CFA, National Director, Institutional, Mariner.

The same playbook can be applied to other markets where relevant public filings are available. Put an AI Workforce on another market, give it Mariner’s criteria for that market, and the same approach can produce a ranked list with a name to call at the top.