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January 01, 2005 at 02:00 AM
For most broker/dealers and their representatives, 2004 was successful: new clients were added, assets under management grew, and revenues were up. That meant that in most–though not all–cases advisors’ take-home pay was higher. While it will be a few more months before we can statistically confirm the success of the independent broker/dealer industry for the full year, at the beginning of 2005 we think that advisors and their broker/dealers have even more reasons to be excited about the future. Here are some positive developments that industry leaders and their reps should capitalize on.
In our mind, the best news for advisors is the fact that independent broker/dealers are focusing plenty of resources to help their advisors become better business managers and improve the profitability of their practices. In recent research, Moss Adams LLP found that since 1999, advisors have experienced an average decline of 18% in personal compensation. At the same time, average revenues grew by more than 50%. The challenge of creating a bigger practice involving multiple practitioners and leveraging staff and overhead seems to have overwhelmed many firms. We believe that the foundation of the problem is the tricky transition from advisor to business manager that successful advisors must overcome. With growth in number of clients and AUM, most firms need to hire, motivate, retain, and manage more people, but few are prepared to accomplish the process smoothly.
The need for more and better practice management tools and services has consistently been voiced by the independent advisory community. For the last three years, it has been the area with the lowest score of satisfaction in the FPA Financial Performance Studies produced by Moss Adams (see Unsatisfied Reps at right).
Despite that dissatisfaction, the good news is that many broker/dealers have recognized this need and have created innovative and practical programs that allow advisors to increase their skills as business managers, get better information on their own businesses, use templates and structured approaches to address common management functions, and find outsourced solutions to many problems. As an example, Tower Square Securities offers what it calls a Business Health Check to help its advisors assess their operating performance from client management to practice succession. Securities America has made its Client Audit tool available to help reps systematically elicit feedback from their clients. It also provides a custom benchmark to help reps measure their practice’s performance. National Financial Partners (NFP) and Linsco/Private Ledger (LPL) provide their advisors with access to internal and external business consultants. Raymond James and Western Reserve Life provide manuals on succession planning for their advisors. The ability to acquire and deliver proven tools to enhance the practices of their advisors has helped these B/Ds evolve from vendor to partner in the relationship with their representatives.
Growing Larger = More Resources
The start of 2004 was marked by the acquisition of WS Griffith by LPL, taking the largest broker/dealer closer to $1 billion in total revenue and fueling anticipation that it will go public in the near future. That possibility, along with the prominence of already-public NFP and Raymond James, is getting the independent B/D industry not only more recognition on Wall Street but also more capital resources that translate into better technology, product platforms, and other capabilities. Many of the top 20 firms are also divisions of large public companies.
Larger and better-capitalized broker/dealers can only be good news to their reps. Ultimately, advisors should recognize that their competition for the best clients is not other independent B/D reps as much as it is the large investment firms like Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. The continuously improving technology, products, and support that the larger broker/dealers can provide will help independent advisors be more successful in the marketplace.
Naturally, there are advisors who view this trend with skepticism, afraid that as their B/Ds grow larger they will lose the personal touch and attention to their needs, and that the indie B/Ds will start looking and behaving like the large brokerages that many advisors left in order to be independent. Fortunately, there are still many broker/dealers that focus on this model and welcome advisors who need more personal attention and a smaller-firm environment. The challenge for advisors who want the benefits of a small firm may be that they have to affiliate with a number of broker/dealers in succession as each follows the same path of growth and leverage.
By contrast, for the B/Ds themselves, recruiting remains their biggest challenge, though compliance with new regulations is in second place (see B/Ds’ Biggest Headaches chart above).
Innovative Models
Competition is always a driver of innovation, and in 2004 broker/dealers introduced new affiliation choices and compensation models for their advisors. The most notable trend is toward closer affiliation between the advisor and his broker/dealer. For years, advisors have moved from closer affiliation models like banks and wirehouses toward fully independent platforms. Now we are seeing some firms experimenting with more involvement of B/D management in the business of individual advisors. The performance of those models will be interesting to follow.
The trend is very logical. Both advisors and the broker/dealer find that they need:
