Principal Financial Group
financial services company
Principal Financial Group, Inc. (PFG) is an American global financial investment management and insurance company headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, United States.
History
PFG was first founded under the name Bankers Life Insurance Company. Bankers Life Insurance Company was founded by wealthy Des Moines bankers, including Edward Temple, Simon Casady, and Phineas M. Casady. The bank was founded in 1879 with Temple as president and Phineas Casady as vice president.
In 2019, Principal purchased Wells Fargo's institutional retirement and trust business (including 401k, pension, executive deferred compensation, employee stock ownership plans and asset advice business) for $1.2 billion. The deal was financed with cash and senior debt financing.
In 2021, activist investor firm Elliott Investment Management took a stake in Principal, saying it will push for changes at the company. Talks with Elliott resulted in the February 2021 announcement of two new independent directors to its board of directors.
In 2024, Principal agreed to acquire the employee stock-option plan (ESOP) business from Ascensus.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Principal Financial Group” is financial services company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Principal, Financial and Group, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “financial services company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3403513. VIAF identifies the subject as 143328600. The Library of Congress control number is nb2009000845. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1879, 2019, 2021 and 2024.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Principal Financial Group”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Principal Financial Group primary sources, Principal Financial Group archive and Principal research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Principal Financial Group” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.