For Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO of asset manager TIAA, saving for retirement is personal—and it's for everyone. She's spoken publicly about how better financial literacy would have been a game changer for her own family and why all Americans need it.
Duckett has pushed TIAA to expand past workplace and personal retirement investments for teachers and higher-education employees, aiming to serve everyone who's headed toward the end of their careers. In particular, the firm is angling to get more of these investors to buy annuities, what it dubs "guaranteed lifetime income," within their plans.
For the past five years, since coming over from JPMorganChase, Duckett has led the 14,000-employee TIAA, which has $1.5 trillion in assets under management, owns the fund company Nuveen, and earlier this year bought British asset manager Schroders for $13.5 billion.
"For over a hundred years, TIAA has proven what guaranteed lifetime income can mean for people's retirement security, and we know that value should not be confined to the market we have traditionally served," Duckett said. "Bringing that same guarantee into the 401(k) space is one of the most important things we are doing right now. It means millions more Americans will have the option to turn their savings into income they can count on for the rest of their lives. That is the work I am most proud of, taking what we have always done well and making sure more people can benefit from it."
In 2025, TIAA partnered with asset management giant Vanguard to sell the first target-date fund with annuity features, building on TIAA and Nuveen's own lifetime-income target-date offerings. Duckett's firm now has $75 billion in target-date assets that have annuities embedded, as of February 2026, which the company says is nearly triple what its next competitor holds.
She's also been steering TIAA further into AI, launching a generative AI platform for employees to answer customer questions and research stocks, and partnering with Google on AI for its contact center. TIAA is also using AI to prevent fraud, automate internal processes and help comply with regulatory requirements.
Duckett serves on several university boards as well as the boards of Nike, Brex and Sesame Workshop, which is behind the children's TV show "Sesame Street". She also founded a nonprofit in her parents' names, the Otis and Rosie Brown Foundation.
