T. Rowe Price Partners With BrightScope to Provide Sales Transparency

T. Rowe Price Retirement Plan Services Inc. has chosen a new BrightScope product to help simplify how its retirement plan sales distribution data is shared and used among service providers, BrightScope announced Tuesday morning.

Using the BrightScope Partners Gateway system, T. Rowe Price will be able to deliver sales information to asset managers, broker-dealers, custodians, recordkeepers and transfer agents who provide services to its clients on T. Rowe Price’s retirement services platform. T. Rowe Price Retirement Plan Services serves more than 3,500 retirement plan sponsors and approximately 2 million plan participants.

“This relationship with BrightScope allows us to give service providers who use our platform and our own executives a way to quickly understand the sales trends on our platform,” said Doug Comer, head of business development at T. Rowe Price Retirement Plan Services, in a statement.

The BrightScope Partners Gateway system, combined with BrightScope’s Beacon analytics engine, will provide a single, secure, cloud-based reporting solution that is customizable to meet each user’s unique business objectives.

“This is really a big step forward for the industry,” BrightScope CEO Mike Alfred told ThinkAdvisor. “It really is a pretty radical departure from how things have been historically.”

In the past, he said, it has been challenging for asset managers to get quality data because recordkeepers send out their data in different files, which can make the data hard to track and understand.

Alfred compared the old system to BrightScope’s new system respectively as a computer from the 1980s with a green screen to a brand-new Android phone with high-level graphics.