“We’re seeing a great level of interest by investment managers who have never worked in the defined-contribution space to find a way for their products to fit,” said Lori Lucas, defined-contribution practice leader at San Francisco-based Callan Associates Inc.

Blackstone, the world’s largest manager of alternative assets such as private equity, real estate and hedge funds, is seeking to develop products that would be suitable for individual investors, according to a separate person who asked not to be named because final decisions on such products haven’t been made yet. The firm last year partnered with Boston-based State Street Corp. to create an exchange-traded fund for speculative-grade loans.

Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for New York-based Blackstone, declined to comment on the plans.

Carlyle’s Plan

Carlyle is raising a fund with New York-based investment firm Central Park Group LLC that will accept as little as $50,000 from individual investors, according to a January regulatory filing. Central Park Group will allocate money from the pool, called CPG Carlyle Private Equity Fund, to a variety of Carlyle-managed funds, with the aim of putting as much as 80 percent of the investors’ capital in buyouts.

The minimum commitment to Carlyle’s funds is typically $5 million to $20 million.

Carlyle, which is based in Washington and oversees $170 billion of assets across 113 funds and 67 funds-of-funds, expects its investment products may eventually reach 401(k) plans, said a person with knowledge of the firm’s strategy.

Pensions have benefited from the ability to access a wider array of asset classes, said Alan Glickstein, senior retirement consultant at Towers Watson & Co., a New York-based professional-services company. Defined-benefit pension plans outperformed 401(k)-type accounts by an annual average of 93 basis points from 1995 through 2008 after adjusting for fees, according to Towers Watson’s latest data. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

Excess Return

“A 1 percent per year difference compounds to a huge differential over a person’s working and retirement lifetime,” Glickstein said. A saver investing $100,000 over a decade at an annual rate of 8 percent, for instance, would earn $19,177 more than he would at a rate of 7 percent.