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Bread Financial Holdings 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options

Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $577m of the $588m in the Bread Financial Holdings plan votes in secret. Fidelity 500 Index Fund, the most common fund in the plans we track, publishes every vote: answer 3 of its ballots, then see your result.

The question on the ballot

As filed

The Bread Financial Holdings 401(k) holds $588m. Of the $577m we could identify from the plan’s own filing, every dollar sits in a fund that publishes no record of how it voted your shares — collective trusts, which unlike a mutual fund file no Form N-PX and leave no public trace of a single vote.

SourceBread Financial Holdings’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing

What the plan holdsVehicleVoting recordValue
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2040 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $105m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2035 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $100m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2045 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $87m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2050 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $74m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2030 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $68m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2055 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $50m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2025 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $46m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2060 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $18m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2020 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $13m
Bread Financial Holdings, Inc.listed as “Employer common stock” Employer stock Voted by the plan trustee $11m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement Income Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $9m
Vanguard Fiduciary Trust Company Target Retirement 2065 Trust Ilisted as “Collective investment trust” Collective trust or separate account NONE $5m

The 12 largest holdings in the plan. “Vehicle” is the description the filing itself gives each investment.

Why there is nothing to show

A mutual fund has to file Form N-PX every year listing every vote it cast on your behalf. A collective investment trust does not. It is a bank-run vehicle sold only inside retirement plans, it is cheaper, and it is now where most 401(k) default money sits — including most target-date funds, which is where savers who never chose anything are put.

So the shares bought with Bread Financial Holdings employees’ retirement savings are voted every proxy season — on executive pay, on board seats, on climate and workforce proposals — and there is no public document anywhere recording how. This is not an oversight by Bread Financial Holdings; it is what the disclosure rules currently require, which is to say: nothing.

What you can do

Check whether your plan offers any registered fund as an alternative — those publish their records, and you can read them here. If it does not, the menu itself is the thing that has to change, and that is a decision made by the plan’s fiduciary committee, not by you alone.

See how funds that do publish voted →

CoverageWe classified 100% of this plan’s assets from the filing. The figure above is the share of the money we could classify; anything we could not identify is excluded from it rather than assumed either way.

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