TD’s Nally: HNW Investors Choosing RIAs Because of Fiduciary Standard

Nally also presented several business opportunities for advisors, particularly among Gen X and Gen Y investors and among women, and called on the advisors in the audience to embrace younger advisors to serve younger investors, all consistent themes of his since being named to succeed Tom Bradley as president of TDAI in February. He argued that the wirehouses are not focused on the younger generation of investors or of advisors, preferring instead older, bigger producers, and that RIAs could steal a march on Gen X and Y investors, who will control $28 trillion in assets within a decade. As for women, Nally repeated his warning that advisors can’t “paint women with a broad brush,” that they must recognize each investor as a unique indicidual with unique needs, and that when advisors have a couple as clients, that they “engage both members.” He got a good response from the audience when he warned advisors not to think that getting and retaining women as clients is a simple matter. “Don’t think you can change your font color to pink” on your advisory firm’s documents and “think you have it covered,” he said.

TD Ameritrade CEO Fred Tomczyk spoke in the general session as well in a “fireside chat” Q&A format with Nally, and the two men later took questions from attendees. Tomczyk reiterated the firm’s commitment to the RIA channel, calling growth among advisors a “secular trend” and the “fastest-growing channel in wealth management. We expect that to continue.”

When asked in a separate interview to expand on his characterization of RIAs, Tomczyk said that it was based on the fundamentals of the advice business, including the fact that after a certain amount of experience, “most advisors want to get off the commission treadmill,” and that breakaway brokers decide to explore independence “often when some disturbing event occurs” at their broker-dealer, such as on compensation.

On the macroeconomic front, Tomczyk was cautiously optimistic, and that even on the fiscal cliff, “once we’re past the election, they’ll get their act together” in Washington and begin to solve those fiscal issues. While warning that “If we let it go four more years, we’ve got much deeper problems,” Tomczyk is confident that either of the presidential candidates will act as “pragmatic problem solvers.”