Who We Are

KTRADE is a recordkeeping firm that serves the retirement plan industry through our Alliance Members, a group of local third party administrators, or TPAs, and investment advisors located throughout the United States.

The KTRADE Alliance Member TPAs currently provide plan administration for over 16,000 retirement plans that cover over 675,000 retirement plan participants and have over $26 billion in retirement plan assets.

Our mission is to provide a high quality, secure and reliable internet-based trading platform. We strive to provide a well-designed path to retirement security for your participants.

At KTRADE, the founding principal that drives our business is the belief that now, more than ever, employees depend on the investment plan offered by their employer to see them through their retirement years. We meet this goal through an open architecture platform. Put simply, this means our alliance partners can customize the retirement plan that best fits your needs and your employees’ objectives.

Our platform is advisor friendly. We don’t place any restrictions on the investment alternatives available. And we have no proprietary investment alternatives. As a result, your Advisor is free to offer your employees the investment alternatives they believe are best for your plan. Also, KTRADE helps your Advisor offer a professionally managed account option through our unique Advisor Portal or to partner with a professional third-party money manager

We know that the ultimate test for any self-directed retirement plan is what it produces at retirement. KTRADE is the key to empowering your plan to maximize its outcomes.

In response to the success achieved during the following six years, KTRADE forged new technology partnerships with a number of interested TPA firms. In 2012, five more TPAs became KTRADE Alliance Members, bringing our current count of Alliance Members to 10. And we’re still growing.

2012

Four additional TPAs recognized that some of their clientele had a need for the services offered by NLG Direct. They partnered with NLG to leverage NLG Direct’s technology; the result of this merger was the birth of North American KTRADE Alliance, LLC (KTRADE).

2005

One of NLG’s founders, Brad Lankford, recognized a need in the retirement plan industry for a lower-cost, fully unbundled, open architecture platform for his clientele. He partnered with SunGard Systems to develop NLG Direct, a daily valuation, open architecture recordkeeping service. NLG Direct began offering this solution to select NLG clients in 2001.

2001

KTRADE started in Plymouth, Indiana as a third party administration firm known as Niles Lankford Group, Inc. (NLG). NLG was created to provide quality retirement plan administration for its clients and their employees. That remains NLG’s primary goal to this day.

1989