Washington Saves puts administrator and state partnerships out to bid

Washington Saves, the state-facilitated auto-IRA program set to debut in 2027, issued a request for proposals for a program administrator and a companion request for information on multi-state partnerships this week, PLANADVISER reported — getting both the vendor and the partnership strategy on paper before the first contribution is collected.

The program will route payroll-deducted IRAs to private-sector employees whose employers do not offer a retirement plan, with qualifying employers enrolling eligible workers at a default contribution rate between 3% and 7% of wages and handling the payroll deduction. The RFP invites bidders to take on program administration, investment management, or both as an integrated solution, covering IRA administration and recordkeeping, custodial and customer service, online platforms, reporting, compliance and communications support, and the design and monitoring of investment options. Bids are due October 9 through Washington's Electronic Business Solution portal.

The RFI asks what cooperation with other state-facilitated retirement savings programs and their service providers could look like, naming governance, administration, technology, investment management, customer service, and reporting as potential areas of collaboration. The administrator search is the board's second procurement; last August it began looking for a consultant to support the program.

Washington's enabling legislation dates to 2024, when the state became the 19th to enact laws expanding retirement coverage; by June 1, the Center for Retirement Initiatives at Georgetown's McCourt School counted 22 states with state-facilitated retirement savings programs, 17 of them auto-IRA states. Eight of those 17 have partnership agreements, starting with Colorado's Colorado Partnership for a Dignified Retirement, launched in 2023; its members as of January 1 were Maine, Delaware, Vermont, Nevada, and Minnesota, in that order of entrance. Hawaii's Retirement Savings Board voted in February to join the Multistate Alliance for Retirement Security, which Rhode Island's RISave had established in 2024.

Washington is buying its administrator and exploring its partnership options in the same week, before the program has collected a single contribution — the cheap order of operations. A program that launches standalone and adopts partners later must reconcile its contracts, technology, and governance with another state's after the fact; a board that writes interoperability into the procurement can make shared infrastructure the vendor's problem. The integrated-solution option in the RFP leaves room for a vendor to run several states' programs under one contract, and the eight agreements already in place suggest the next administrator hired will be expected to do exactly that. That makes the October 9 bids worth watching: a vendor that can serve multiple states is a larger prize than a single-state mandate.