“Our business model is one of shared economies of scale,” says Brian Shea, referring to Pershing, the company of which he is CEO. Speaking of Pershing’s broker-dealer and RIA clients, he said “we leverage each other’s respective strengths.”
He believes the independent broker-dealer model is doing well, noting that in 2010, broker-dealers that clear through Pershing attracted more new accounts, and more assets, from the eight biggest Wall Street firms than accounts and assets that “went the other way.”
In an interview with AdvisorOne on Wednesday, Shea said bluntly that “the biggest pain point for broker-dealers is regulatory change.” To help its correspondent BDs deal with the pain, Shea mentioned the multiple sessions on compliance during the 13th annual Pershing Insite conference that is under way from June 8 to 10, a new minisite on Pershing.com called Industry Watch that delivers news and analysis on regulatory change, and a series of compliance calls that Pershing sponsors for its clients. Formerly quarterly, those calls now take place every six weeks, he said.