Hello everyone and welcome to At Barents. I'm Andy Surwer and welcome to our guest

Dechonda Duccott, CEO of TIA. Dishanda, great to see you.

It's great to see you again.

Thank you so much for joining us because I want to know about what TIA is up to these days.

And people have heard of the company, but maybe they don't know the full scale and the purview.

So could you tell us about that, please?

No, I'd love to.

So to give you a little context from a historical perspective, we are 106 years old.

We were founded by Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie observed that faculty was educating some of the world's most brilliant

minds in academia, but they were retiring in poverty and not with dignity.

And as a result, we formed TIAA to make sure that people could have an in-plan annuity that could

give them an income stream, that they could not outlive and be on a path to have a more secure

retirement.

And so fast forward, 106 years later, we serve thousands of institutions, millions of participants.

We operate without profit, so we return all of our profits back to our

participants. We have a board of governors that in effect owns us on behalf of those participants,

and we are just very serious about making sure that more people can have a dignified retirement.

Right. And that point you made about the board of Governors and the members or the customers, the

shareholders, the policyholders.

It's sort of like Vanguard in that sense, that it's those are the people that own the company.

So you guys are kind of the retirement experts.

And it's, again, the company's kind of unusual.

...