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Industry Spotlight > Broker Dealers

RCS Capital Hires Dwyer

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RCS Capital, which has been adding broker-dealers at a frenetic pace, recently made several of shifts to its executive team. The New York-based firm’s new leaders include former LPL Financial executive Bill Dwyer, who is now CEO of the firm’s Realty Capital Securities unit. Sansay Yodh, previously head of institutional sales at ProShares, has been tapped as executive vice president of RCAP’s liquid alternative investments.

RCAP President Michael Weil has become CEO of the company, succeeding William M. Kahane, who remains a director. John Grady, who has held different leadership positions at RCAP and AR Capital, will now serve as chief strategy and risk officer of RCAP. Nicholas Schorsch continues as executive chairman.

“We had the opportunity to bring [Bill Dwyer] in as CEO for the wholesale distribution platform and felt he was the perfect person to continue the growth track we’ve been on since 2006,” said Weil, in an interview.

Yodh, he adds, “also gives us a deep bench” as RCAP looks to further grow its fund and alternative investment sales.

The alternatives platform, which includes both liquid and illiquid alternative investments, has “tremendous opportunities” for expansion, Weil says. “Bill will take us through expanded distribution” in the independent, bank, RIA and other channels, including the wirehouse channel.

Dwyer, who is based in Boston, was previously president of LPL Financial Independent Advisor Services. He left that post in March 2013, after some 20 years with the independent broker-dealer, to focus on his work with Invest in Others Charitable Foundation, set up by LPL in 2006 to boost philanthropic and volunteer activities of financial advisors nationwide.

“What’s exciting for me, after my work with a specific broker-dealer at LPL, is that I now get to work with a provider of product solutions for something like 100,000 financial advisors across the industry,” Dwyer said in an interview.

“We want to continue to develop the relationship we have with LPL and others on the broker-dealer and custodial side within financial institutions,” he explained. “Having been on that side of table, I can now … help [RCS Capital] work more with financial advisors through its alternatives distribution platform.”

RCAP counts LPL Financial as one of its alternatives clients. Its Hatteras funds are on some wirehouse platforms. But the company would like to build relationships with other broker-dealers.

“We have 320 relationships with broker-dealers currently and look to expand that every day, which is where Bill and I see eye to eye,” said Weil, joking that this is “no small feat”—given that Dwyer is 6 feet, 8 inches tall and he is 5 foot 7.

“This is an industry of big and small platforms,” he continued, “and what all the players do is generally the same—serve the needs of financial advisors,” he continued. “To be a partner on these platforms, we have to provide the right products and services to advisors.”

Is there any challenge being both a product distributor to FAs and also a retail network? (Its Cetera Financial Group has some 9,700 affiliated independent reps.)

“Insurance companies have proven this model [works] for decades,” Weil said, pointing to groups like AXA and AIG. (Larry Roth, who heads Cetera, was formerly head of the AIG-owned Advisor Group of IBDs.)

“Many companies with great broker-dealer platforms also operate on the manufacturing side of the business,” he explained. “It’s not really an issue.… We are very respectful of other platforms, and adoption of our investment strategies is beneficial to them, along with their advisors and investor clients in the high-net-worth and mass affluent segments.”

In other news involving a former LPL Financial executive, Lucia Capital Group—led by Derek Bruton—says it has inked its first acquisition. The San Diego-based wealth management firm said it recently signed a deal to buy the managed equity and fixed income accounts of West Coast Asset Management, an independent RIA in Santa Barbara, California, with some $170 million in client assets.

The deal means that two WCAM leaders will join its operations: Lance Helfert, president of WCAM, is now a senior vice president of Lucia Capital, while WCAM Chief Investment Officer Atticus Lowe, CFA, is part of its research and investment management group.


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