Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America

What does TIAA own?

TIAA's main operating businesses are its retirement services arm and Nuveen, its wholly owned asset management subsidiary. It also operates TIAA Wealth Management and TIAA Trust, N.A. and holds a non-controlling stake in EverBank following the 2023 sale of TIAA Bank.

Is TIAA publicly traded?

No. TIAA is a private, nonprofit-chartered organization with no shareholders and no stock listing. It is governed by a board of governors and operates for the benefit of its participants.

Who founded TIAA?

TIAA was incorporated in 1918 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the organization Andrew Carnegie endowed in 1905. The foundation created TIAA to convert Carnegie's professor pension grants into a sustainable contributory retirement system.

Where is TIAA headquartered?

TIAA is headquartered in New York, New York, USA, at 730 Third Avenue. Nuveen is also headquartered in New York, while large operations centers exist in Charlotte, North Carolina and other US cities.

How many brands does TIAA own?

TIAA operates two principal brands: the TIAA brand for retirement, annuity, and wealth services, and Nuveen for asset management. It previously operated TIAA Bank and used the TIAA-CREF name until a 2016 rebranding.

Who owns TIAA?

No outside party owns TIAA. As a nonprofit-chartered organization it has no shareholders, and its earnings are retained for the benefit of retirement plan participants and policyholders.

How large is TIAA?

TIAA reported $1.5 trillion in assets under management as of December 31, 2025, revenue of approximately $46.9 billion (FY2025, Fortune estimate), and roughly 15,600 employees. It paid $6.17 billion in lifetime income to retired clients in 2025.

TIAA's origins date to 1905, when steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching with a $10 million endowment. The foundation's original purpose was to fund free pensions for college professors, a benefit Carnegie believed educators had earned but that institutions could not afford to provide individually.

By the mid-1910s, the gift-pension model was proving unsustainable as more professors qualified than the foundation's endowment could support. In 1918 the foundation incorporated the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association as a contributory insurance organization. Under the new model, colleges and professors contributed jointly to individual annuity contracts, shifting pensions from charity to funded retirement savings. That structure made TIAA an early architect of the modern defined contribution retirement plan.

A turning point came in 1952 when TIAA created the College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF), the first variable annuity in the United States. CREF let participants invest contributions in equities rather than fixed-income instruments only, an approach designed to protect retirement income from inflation. The variable annuity model was later adopted across the insurance industry.

For most of its history TIAA served only the nonprofit education and research sector and held a federal tax exemption. The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 removed that exemption, and the organization gradually expanded into wider markets. In the 2000s it began offering retail mutual funds, brokerage services, and advice to individuals outside its institutional base, and it started competing for corporate 401(k) plans.

Under CEO Roger Ferguson, who led the organization from 2008 to 2021, TIAA made its largest acquisition: the 2014 purchase of Nuveen Investments for approximately $6.25 billion. The deal transformed TIAA from a retirement plan administrator into one of the world's largest asset managers, adding capabilities in real estate, farmland, municipal bonds, and alternatives. In 2016 the organization shortened its public-facing name from TIAA-CREF to TIAA.

In 2017 TIAA acquired EverBank Financial Corp for approximately $2.5 billion and renamed it TIAA Bank. The banking experiment ended in August 2023 when TIAA sold the bank to a private investor group, which restored the EverBank name. TIAA kept the trust business as TIAA Trust, N.A. and retained a non-controlling stake in EverBank.

Thasunda Brown Duckett became President and CEO in May 2021, arriving from JPMorgan Chase where she had led consumer banking. Under Duckett, the organization has pushed beyond its 403(b) base into corporate retirement plans and expanded annuity-embedded default options in 401(k) plans. In late 2025 it rebranded its advice business as TIAA Wealth Management, opening advisory services to a broader audience. Assets under management reached $1.5 trillion by the end of 2025, up from $1.28 trillion in 2023, though the organization reported a net loss of approximately $1.9 billion in 2024, largely tied to investment and reserve accounting.

TIAA has appeared for multiple years on Ethisphere's list of the World's Most Ethical Companies, an independent recognition of corporate ethics programs. CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett has been named to Fortune's Most Powerful Women list, most recently in 2025, where the publication noted her work expanding TIAA's client base beyond its nonprofit roots.

Nuveen consistently ranks among the top 20 global asset managers in the annual Pensions & Investments survey of worldwide assets under management, based on year-end 2024 data. Nuveen Real Estate ranks among the largest real estate investment managers globally on the same survey.

In July 2021, the SEC and the New York Attorney General announced a $97 million settlement with TIAA-CREF Individual & Institutional Services, a TIAA subsidiary, over misleading rollover recommendations. Regulators found that from roughly 2012 through March 2018, advisers were incentivized to move clients from low-cost employer-sponsored plans into the higher-fee Portfolio Advisor managed account program, while describing themselves as objective and non-commissioned fiduciaries. The settlement returned funds to affected investors and required reforms to compensation and disclosure practices.

TIAA has also faced periodic litigation from plan participants and institutions over fees and fiduciary obligations, a common exposure for large retirement plan providers. Several university retirement plan lawsuits filed in the 2010s were settled or dismissed; others produced industry-wide changes in fee disclosure. None has resulted in a finding of liability against TIAA itself at trial.