Name: A CEO Talks AI, Retirement Planning, and Privates
Uploaded: 2026-01-01T16:00:00Z
Duration: 19 min 31 s
Description: Deanna Strable, CEO of Principal Financial Group, spoke about the company's array of products, its stock performance, and more.

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Deanna Strable, CEO of Principal Financial Group, spoke about the company's array of products, its stock performance, and more.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251231/0ab33d68-a64b-4351-abc5-a57e9830efdf/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

A CEO Talks AI, Retirement Planning, and Privates

Hello, everyone, and welcome to "At Barron's." I'm Andy Serwer, and welcome to our guest Deanna Strable, CEO of Principal Financial Group. Deanna, great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Andy, thanks for having me here today.

So Principal is in four lines of business if you include international. You've got asset management, you've got retirement, and then group insurance as well. What else should we know about Principal top line?

Yeah, a couple things I had mentioned there. First of all, we're 145-year-old company. We're headquartered in Des Moines, but we actually have more of our customers and more of our employees outside of the US around the globe. You mentioned, again, four businesses. We have consolidated asset management and international, so three main businesses, retirement, benefits and protection which primarily is group employee benefits, and then our asset management business. 20,000 employees 70 million customers plus and customers in 80 countries around the globe.

What parts of the business have the most opportunity, Deanna, right now?

Yeah, the great news is I'd say we're positioned really well in all three of them and we benefit greatly from diversification. And so ultimately, they're not all being propelled at the same rate at the same time. But when we put 'em together and really focus on those things that can drive growth, it allows us to have much more consistent results, but also having very strong results relative to our peers as well.

You've been CEO since January of 2025. What's your vision? What's your strategy? What are you hoping to accomplish?

Yeah, I'll start with I've been at the company for 35 years and was humbled and honored to be stepping into the role as CEO after my predecessor and a great line of former CEOs as well. The great news is I knew the company. I had been part of the management team. And over the last two to three years, that team has really been refining our strategy. And so when I walked into the role early January, the strategy was pretty set and we had rolled that out to our investors in fourth quarter of last year. And so it allowed me to really focus on not developing a strategy or fixing things that weren't right, but really how do we make sure we're successfully executing on that strategy and ultimately propelling the company toward strong growth and executing on meeting the needs of our customers as well as our employees.

What do you think the challenges are for your businesses looking at various pieces of them?

Yeah, I'd say two that I would mention. One is a number of our businesses do have fee compression just built in to those. That would be really the US retirement business as well as the asset management business as customers are really gravitating towards lower cost options that provides some headwinds that we have to overcome with ultimate customer growth that can offset that. And so I'd say that's one challenge. I'd say the other challenge, which starts with an opportunity, but how we react to that opportunity is a challenge, is we're offering products that everyone really needs and those needs are actually even higher today as I think about retirement when I think about saving for the future. But, ultimately, if you think about our customer base, our potential customer base, that's spanning six generations of people and how they think about these solutions that we offer, how they think about retirement, how they think about investing and saving for the future is not top of mind and a priority. So how do we make it simpler for them? How do we make it easier for them and how do we make sure that we're meeting them where they are so that we can continue to grow but also continue to deliver on the promises that we wanna make to help our customers be more financially secure.

Can you tell us a little bit about the asset management business? What's your AUM and how are your products distributed, et cetera?

Yeah, so we have a nearly 800 billion AUM. A big chunk of that is actually supporting retirement. So three to 400 of that is actually supporting retirement assets, a lot of that being to support what we offer at the workplace, which is defined benefit and defined contribution plans. And so I'd say that's a big focus of ours, is making sure that our AUM is suitable for retirement. There's also another portion of our AUM that is actually supporting our insurance products. And so, obviously, as an insurance company with life insurance, disability insurance, annuities, we have to have the money that supports those promises that are gonna be paid out over a long period of time. And so that actually was how we got into the asset management business, was supporting our own solutions, whether it be retirement or insurance. And about 25 to 30 years ago, we said we have some really good capabilities here. How do we offer that more to third party clients as well? Institutions around the globe is really our focus. And so real estate has been a stronghold of ours over the last few years. We've been expanding that to other private assets such as private credit as well as infrastructure. And so privates is a big focus of ours, really for the institutional client base. But over time, it will become more and more important for our retirement customers as well. And then things like international equity, high yield, thinking about assets that really work well to provide income to institutions and individuals around the globe.

Let me ask you about privates into 401Ks and retirement. Do investors or retirees or US citizens really want that and do they need them? Give us your take on that.

Yeah, you mentioned something that's been in the paper a lot over the last year, and obviously the administration has even put things in place that will make that more available, and we applaud that. If you just think of the number of public companies has been coming down. And so even to have a broad based universe to invest in, having privates available is important as well. What I would say though is even though we do think it's an important step, we think it's gonna take some time. And the reason we think it's gonna take time is exactly what you said. Sitting here today, we have 40 to 50,000 employers that we work with, offering them 401k. We have tens of millions of actual customers of those, and those customers are not asking us to add privates to their investment lineup today. And when we also survey them with research, the majority of them aren't even knowledgeable about what privates are, how they could fit into retirement. And so I think when you think of both of those things, that points to the fact that it's gonna take some time. The other thing I think is very important is if you think about the universe of people that are covered by 401k, there is the majority of those that the 401k is really their only retirement nest egg. And so the investments that they need to have have to be much more risk tolerant to make sure that they're not gonna have big swings one way or another. That varies significantly from the smaller portion of the 401k participants where 401k is just a small part of their overall retirement. And so it allows them the opportunity to think differently about their risk profile and how they want to think about investing that. And so we really do think advice is gonna be critical, and ultimately to come back to, we think it will take some time to play out in the 401k market,

A couple of other newsy subjects. I wanted to ask you about proxy advisory firms like Glass Lewis and ISS are under fire these days. And I'm wondering, as a CEO, what your take is on that.

Yeah, those are both entities that we look at, and I'll answer it on two fronts. We are a public company obviously, and our shareholders look to those types of organizations when they think about how they vote with our proxy and our votes. And so we pay attention to their recommendations, but I think more and more investors are making their own decisions relative to that. And then the other place that I would say that that's important is we are a asset manager, and so our asset portfolio managers are also making decisions of how they want to vote. And again, what I would say is ISS and Glass Lewis are an input to those, but we really do look at it as a responsibility as an asset manager to have our own opinion on what makes sense from a voting perspective.

There's also been talk, Deanna, of not having companies report quarterly, and stretching it out to maybe twice a year. You supportive of that, or what do you think about that one?

Yeah, when I think about the time that I personally and my management team spend on preparing for those calls, there's obviously some attraction to that. What I'd also say is I worked at Principal before we were a public company? We went public in 2001. Interesting fact is we were the actual, the first company to go public post 9/11, and it was a real sign that the markets were open and going forward. But, ultimately, I've seen the benefit of us being better business managers being a public company than prior to us being public. So I think there is a benefit of being able to share, share your results and ultimately be able to communicate in a way that resonates with your perspective as well as your current shareholders. I think there is advantages to that. I think it'll be very interesting to see how it plays out. Because even in the countries where they allow that, there's still a lot of companies that are reporting quarterly. And ultimately, what I've also heard is even if they stretched it out to twice a year, there still would need to be some communication on probably a quarterly basis on how is the company operating. And so really I think that each industry as well as each company would have to weigh what makes the most sense from them and what is the easiest way for us to get what information is critical for our shareholders.

What's your take on the macro economic environment right now? I mean, we've got inflation still percolating. Maybe the job market not so strong, but the economy overall seems to be okay. What do you think?

Yeah, and we do a lot of surveying of our customers, and here in the US our niche is really around the small to medium-sized customer. We have employers of all size cases. And when we survey them, I would say they feel pretty good about their own business, but when they think about the overall economy, I'd say their optimism continues to reduce. And I think some of that's being caused by tariffs. I think some of it's being impacted by what you said, which is inflation, job, kind of job and employment. But when we survey the overall customer base, especially what I would say is really what supports the overall US economy, which is those small businesses, they feel really good about their own business. So I do think I agree with you that the underlying aspect of the US economy is really strong, but I think we're gonna have a lot of volatility. And ultimately, as a business, we have two things. One is our diversification of our business worldwide helps with that, but ultimately it comes back to we have to be here for our customers and ultimately making sure that we can support their questions as they think about how this overall economy might play out.

What regulatory changes would you like to see come out of Washington that would be good for your company?

Yeah, the great news there is, and retirement is really what we work with the administration on, and the great news about retirement is it's a bipartisan priority. And so we have seen a number of regulations be advanced over the last five to 10 years, from both sides of the administration and political aisle. And ultimately what they're trying to do is encourage employers to offer 401Ks. And so there's been tax incentives that have done that. There's been things such as making it much more available to offer auto-enroll or auto escalate. And so those are the kind of things that really allow us to continue to deliver on our promise to our customers to help them become more secure in their retirement and also encourage employers to offer that to their employees because we do think workplace is the most efficient and the most effective way to offer those benefits. And so what I would say is we're laser focused on making sure those incentives encourages the creation of retirement plans.

I can't even imagine, Deanna, how much data your company has. So that would seem to lend itself to AI applications. And I'm wondering how you're using AI.

Yeah, you've hit a spot that I have a great passion about, and it was one of my priorities as I came into this role early this year. AI is a tool that I think is going to be so significantly impactful to every person in every company. A couple of things I'll mention first is that, unlike some other technology advancements, this is something that can apply to every type of job and it's more important that you are doing it in the right way. In most situations you're augmenting a person and making them more productive, but ultimately it's gonna allow us to be even more efficient, effective in how we interact with our customers as well. Two things that we're doing, and one is a little unique that I championed as I came in, which is we are really doubling down on employee education and literacy. We have undertaken a endeavor to train all 20,000 of our employees on AI. And when I say train, it's a seven to 10-hour curriculum that we're doing you over the course of 2025. And then as we move into 26, it'll become even more specialized based on the roles of those individuals. We've also embedded it into new orientation for our employees so that they have that as they come forward. And so we're seeing every day examples where people are just becoming more productive in what they do in their job. And if you can scale that over 20,000 employees, we're gonna see some impact. The other thing I would say beyond literacy is we're really seeing the opportunity to go deeper in some areas, whether it be making it professionals be more efficient in how they code, whether it's making our engagement center employees more efficient in answering questions for the employees. And then there's been a lot of examples of teams of 10 people that had very manual jobs that they, one, didn't like and, two, wasn't very accurate at. And we've taken 90% of the work out of that. The other, the nine people that now don't have to spend the time on that, we are morphing into other roles that can support our growth, And ultimately, we're meeting the needs of our customer in a much more effective and efficient way.

Is it impacting employment?

You know, we're a growing company, so first and foremost what I would say is, if we can do the same amount of work for more customers with the same amount of employees, that's a win-win for all of us. If we weren't seeing growth, then ultimately how that translated to efficiency would come differently, but really our focus is on let's grow, let's ultimately allow our employees the ability to be impactful in the way that they do their jobs and ultimately we haven't seen a bottom line impacting number of employees.

I wanna ask you about your stock, which has gone sideways, to be perfectly honest, over the past three years, picked up a little bit since you've been CEO on a relative basis to the S&P 500. Why is that, Deanna, and what are you doing to drive value for shareholders?

Yeah, it's a great question, and I spend a lot of time, as you might suspect, talking to our shareholders. And the first thing I would say is very pleased with the progress we've made this year, really translating our strong performance into strong stockholder reward as well. What I would say over the last few years is, whether you look at a three-year number, a five-year number, there is impact of your starting point and your ending point. And we had very strong performance coming out of COVID and ultimately having some changes in our product mix changes in our capital deployment strategy, and there was a little bit of a plateau over the last three years as we divested of some businesses, as our earnings were impacted by those divestitures. And really, as we came into '24 and now into '25, really leaning into growth and ultimately providing strong returns to our shareholders as well as strong dividends as well, which is a key part of our capital deployment plans.

And final question. You mentioned you'd worked at Principal all these years, so I know it runs in your blood, but you must do some things outside of work. What do you do to unwind and relax a little bit outside of the office, Deanna?

Yeah, so travel is something my husband and I enjoy. We had the ability to take some trips this year, and a lot of times our travel centers around wine. We like wine and food and having the ability to combine friends and travel, and good food is something we like to do. And then I like to read. And again, when I do read outside of work, it tends to be fiction just to allow your mind to unwind a little bit, and make sure that you can be as fresh as you can when you're on the job and focused on what we do on a daily basis.

You've joined the company right outta school though, right? So you've really been there all that time.

I did, but I've had 15 different roles. And so the great thing is I've moved different businesses, different roles. I was CFO. I ran our insurance business. So the great thing is, ultimately, I've been able to benefit from diversity of learning different types of opportunities. It's a great culture. What we do every day, meeting the needs of our customers, is something I'm really proud of. And ultimately being able to continue to do that for our customers and employees is what makes my role today so satisfying.

Deanna Strable, CEO of Principal Financial, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you Andy.

This is "At Barron's." I'm Andy Serwer. We'll catch you next time.