small-business-retirement
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Ubiquity’s 401(k) bet: let savings grow, not the fee
Since 1999, Ubiquity Retirement + Savings has built retirement plans for businesses too small to command Wall Street’s attention. Its wager is simple: charge for the work, rather than a percentage of the nest egg.
Vestwell
Vestwell is a New York-based fintech that operates as digital savings infrastructure for the American workplace. Founded in 2016 by Aaron Schumm, it provides an API-driven recordkeeping and administration platform that lets employers, financial advisors, payroll providers, and state governments offer 401(k), 403(b), IRA, 529 education, ABLE disability, and emergency savings accounts. By 2026 the company administered more than $50B in assets for over 2 million savers, powered the majority of state-facilitated retirement programs in the U.S., and raised a $385M Series E to expand the modern savings economy.
Jean Smart
Jean Smart is the founder and CEO of Penelope, a New York fintech rebuilding the retirement recordkeeping layer for the small and micro-businesses Wall Street forgot. After a 20-plus year career as a financial-services executive at Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Citigroup and UBS, she left a managing-director seat to build affordable, fully-digital 401(k) infrastructure for solopreneurs and mom-and-pop shops. The company, which she named after her daughter, launched in 2022 with a mission to put generational wealth-building within reach of the workers institutions have historically overlooked.