Kourtney Gibson is passionate about making sure that every American has a reliable
As senior executive vice president and chief institutional client officer at TIAA, Gibson oversees the company's
Before taking on her current role, Gibson was executive vice chair of Loop Capital. She spent 20 years at Loop in a variety of roles, ending her time there by setting long-term strategy and aligning resources to deepen client relationships and deliver solutions.
Gibson earned an undergraduate degree in business from the University of Miami and an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
She has put her money behind education, which she sees as a crucial part of solving the retirement crisis. According to TIAA, there's a roughly $4 trillion gap between what Americans should save for retirement and what they actually tuck away.
In 2013, Gibson became the youngest person ever to endow a scholarship at the University of Miami. The Kourtney K. Ratliff Scholarship for Academic Excellence goes to African American students from the Midwest who major in business. In 2017, Gibson made another endowment gift, this time to Viterbo University to establish the Sister Thea Bowman Scholarship fund, which helps enhance diversity. As a show of gratitude, Viterbo named its Nola Starling Recital Hall in honor of Gibson's mother, a Viterbo alumna.
"TIAA invented the annuity, and we give profits back to the participants that we serve. That puts us in a unique position to help," Gibson says, though doing so requires the company to shed its somewhat sleepy culture. "I come from an entrepreneurial environment and getting TIAA to work like a boutique company rather than a 100-year-old company is tough," she says. "We operated a monopoly in higher education and not-for-profit, and we didn't build the muscles to focus on growing and winning. We need to give the next generation of leaders what they need to grow."
Ensuring that TIAA professionals get in front of potential and existing clients to explain how even modest additional savings and guaranteed income products can benefit their retirement planning is part of Gibson's push.
"We want to get people to think about lifetime income as part of a total portfolio and hope to bridge the gap between Social Security and people not saving enough to cover longer lifespans," Gibson says.
Telling every employee at client organizations that they are eligible for TIAA retirement products is another element of her plan. "The same plan is available to professors and to the people who keep up the grounds, but the people who keep up the grounds think that these products aren't for them," she says.
In response to Gibson's work, the number of clients implementing advice from personal sessions is up 42% from last year, and the number of people contributing to TIAA's core lifetime income product is up 10%, reversing a downward trend.
Gibson's role includes leading TIAA's default product, Retire Plus, which embeds lifetime income in a diversified investment portfolio. During 2023, multiple large client organizations, including the University of Pittsburgh, Mount Sinai Health System, Temple University and the state of Rhode Island, started offering Retire Plus to their employees, and assets inside the offering went from $12 billion to $30 billion.
"I'm hoping to end 2024 with $50 billion in Retire Plus," Gibson says. "I'm particularly proud of making a tremendous amount of progress in a short period of time and bringing more people on track for retirement."
