TD Ameritrade Institutional Increases Offerings for Emerging RIAs

TD Ameritrade Institutional announced this week that it is increasing its services to emerging advisory firms by expanding its educational offerings, hosting more learning events and dedicating teams of technology and business consultants to help emerging advisory firms grow more rapidly.

“Firms with less than $100 million in assets tend to have a flatter organization structure, which means they can be more agile and responsive to changing client needs and preferences,” Janelle Ward, head of TD Ameritrade Institutional’s emerging advisor accelerator group, said in a statement. “This enables emerging firms to make decisions on big changes like technology, marketing strategy and client experience faster than their more established peers.

“These up and coming firms also are hungry for knowledge that helps them grow, and so we see high demand for curated content and engagement with our consultants.”

According to the statement, the latest enhancement is the Education Center’s Emerging Advisors Learning Path, which lays out a series of courses tailored for emerging advisors, such as getting started with technology, growing the business, an in-depth look at TD Ameritrade’s offerings, and research and benchmarking.

Soon, TD Ameritrade Institutional will bring all this education and consulting support together through an interactive digital roadmap, an online tool that will provide RIAs easy access to the firm’s suite of tech, practice management and education offerings.

The firm is also increasing its support for facilitating connections between advisors who may be interested in growing via mergers and acquisitions. TD Ameritrade International said its benchmarking research has found that two-thirds of RIA transactions were pursued with the objective of driving greater revenue growth and economies of scale.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing emerging firms join larger firms to accelerate growth, a trend we expect will continue for some time,” Ward said.

Surging Asset Growth

TD Ameritrade Institutional said its analysis showed that advisors managing less than $100 million in client assets were experiencing significant growth, having seen assets increase by more than 24% annually on average over the past five years.

Last year, according to the analysis, emerging firms with at least $10 million in assets and more than 24 months on the TD Ameritrade platform delivered 16% growth even as the stock market lost ground.

Ward said emerging advisors on the platform were early adopters of technology that drives greater efficiency and productivity, such as digital account opening, e-signature and electronic statement delivery.

— Check out Future of Advisor Tech in Focus at T3 on ThinkAdvisor.