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February 01, 2012 at 07:00 PM
Out with the old, in with the new. The Museum of American Finance was a particularly appropriate setting for the roundtable discussion on succession planning detailed in this month’s cover story. One couldn’t help but wonder if the advisory business would one day end up as dusty pictures down darkened hallways visited by bored schoolchildren once every few years (metaphorically speaking, of course. The Museum of American Finance is a fine institution; airy and inviting).
The “Doomsday Clock” urgency that meets the ever-advancing average age of the advisor illustrates the problem. A much-trumpeted report in 2010 from Cerulli Associates found the average age to be 49. But it was the following statistics from the Boston-based research firm that got everyone’s attention—less than 25% of all advisors are under the age of 40, and only 5.6% of advisors are under 30.
“As the Baby Boom advisors retire, the financial advisory industry runs the risk of not being able to meet investor demand,” Cerulli analysts wrote in one of the more obvious interpretations of the data. When aggregated from the 1970s to 2008, Cerulli’s data found that wirehouses and insurance firms are still the most common sources of new advisors, with 29% of new advisors coming from the wirehouses and 26% from insurers. It doesn’t account for the wirehouse exodus post-2008, but it’s revealing nonetheless.
