Principal Financial Group, Inc.

What does Principal Financial Group own?
The company's operating assets are its businesses rather than brand portfolios: Principal Life Insurance Company, Principal Asset Management, its international pension subsidiaries, and broker-dealer operations. It administers retirement plans and manages investments for roughly 70 million customers.

Is Principal Financial Group publicly traded?
Yes. It trades on the Nasdaq Stock Market under ticker PFG and is a component of the S&P 500. It has been public since its October 2001 demutualization.

Who founded Principal Financial Group?
Des Moines banker Edward Temple founded the company in 1879 with fellow bankers including Simon Casady and Phineas Casady. They organized The Bankers Life Association to sell affordable life insurance to bankers and their employees.

Where is Principal Financial Group headquartered?
The company is headquartered at 711 High Street in Des Moines, Iowa, where it has been based since its founding. Approximately 9,000 of its roughly 19,700 employees work in the Des Moines area.

How many brands does Principal Financial Group own?
Principal operates as a single-brand company. Its named divisions, including Principal Asset Management, Principal International, and Principal Securities, function under the master Principal brand rather than as independent consumer brands.

Who owns Principal Financial Group?
Public shareholders own the company, with institutional investors and index funds holding most shares. No controlling shareholder or founding family stake exists. Deanna Strable-Soethout has served as chair, president, and CEO since 2025.

What is Principal's revenue and size?
The company reported GAAP revenue of $15.6 billion and net income of approximately $1.2 billion for fiscal year 2025. It manages $781 billion in assets within $1.8 trillion in assets under administration and employs approximately 19,700 people.

The company began on July 1, 1879, when Des Moines banker Edward Temple and fellow bankers including Simon Casady and Phineas Casady organized The Bankers Life Association. The founders each contributed $750 to sell inexpensive life insurance to bankers and bank employees, a market that distant eastern insurers served poorly and expensively.

Bankers Life converted to a mutual legal reserve company in 1911, putting ownership in the hands of policyholders, and spent the next seven decades building a national life insurance and group benefits business. It moved into the pension market as employer-sponsored retirement plans spread after World War II, a decision that eventually made retirement savings, not life insurance, the core of the enterprise.

The company adopted the Principal name in 1985 to reflect a portfolio that had outgrown the Bankers Life label. The 1990s brought two structural changes: reorganization under a mutual holding company, and international expansion into pension markets in Latin America and Asia that paralleled the US 401(k) system.

The defining corporate event came in October 2001, when Principal demutualized and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The IPO converted policyholder ownership into shares and raised capital for expansion. It was one of the largest US insurance demutualizations, in the same era that brought Prudential and MetLife public. The listing later moved to Nasdaq.

Post-IPO history is a story of deliberate narrowing. The company bought specialty benefits operations to build its workplace insurance position, grew Principal Global Investors into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar asset manager, and then shed businesses that diluted its focus. It exited retail banking in 2018, sold its retail fixed annuity business to Talcott Resolution with the transaction completing in 2022, and consolidated its investment arms, merging Principal Global Investors and Principal Real Estate Investors into a unified Principal Asset Management.

Leadership transition came in 2025. Dan Houston, CEO since 2015, retired and handed the role to Deanna Strable-Soethout, the company's chief financial officer and a 35-year veteran. Her first full year produced strong results: GAAP revenue of $15.6 billion, net income of approximately $1.2 billion, non-GAAP operating earnings of $1.9 billion up 14 percent, operating earnings per share of $8.27 up 19 percent, and $1.5 billion returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. The flagship insurer's risk-based capital ratio stood at 406 percent at year-end 2025, and the board raised the quarterly dividend to $0.80 per share for early 2026.

As a financial services firm, Principal's sustainability profile centers on investment stewardship and corporate operations rather than product-level certifications. It publishes annual sustainability and climate disclosures aligned with standard frameworks.

Principal Asset Management integrates ESG analysis into investment processes and maintains responsible investment funds, though the firm has kept a lower profile on climate commitments than peers that joined and later exited net-zero alliances. The company is not a certified B Corp.

On governance ethics, the company's demutualized structure and S&P 500 status subject it to standard disclosure, audit, and shareholder accountability requirements. Its most notable self-reported commitments cover workforce inclusion and community investment concentrated in Des Moines, where it is the largest private employer.

Principal is a component of the S&P 500 and a regular member of the Fortune 500, placing it among the largest US corporations by revenue.

The company has appeared on Newsweek's America's Most Responsible Companies list and Forbes employer rankings in recent years. CEO Deanna Strable-Soethout's 2025 appointment made her one of relatively few women leading an S&P 500 financial services company, a milestone covered in the business press.

401(k) fee litigation: Principal has faced ERISA class actions alleging excessive fees in workplace retirement plans, including a suit over fees in its own employee 401(k) plan. The company settled in 2021 for approximately $30 million without admitting wrongdoing, a resolution common across the recordkeeping industry, which has seen hundreds of similar suits.

Annuity market exit: The company faced the industry-wide criticism of retail annuity surrender charges and commission structures before exiting the business through its 2022 transaction with Talcott Resolution. The exit was a strategic portfolio decision rather than a regulatory action.

Regulatory environment: The company operates under continuous supervision from the SEC, FINRA, state insurance departments led by Iowa, and pension regulators in its international markets. Its public record shows routine examinations rather than major enforcement actions as of November 2026.