Advisor Group Hires Ex-Schwab Exec to Lead Digital Solutions

Advisor Group has appointed Peter Clemson, a 25-year fintech veteran, to the newly created position of senior vice president, digital solutions, to lead its ongoing buildout of digital offerings for advisors and their clients, it said Thursday.

Clemson, a former Charles Schwab executive, will take the helm of Advisor Group’s digital solutions that include its eQuipt onboarding platform, “emphasizing technology that enables collaboration and focuses on the ease of doing business for financial professionals and increasingly tech-savvy clients,” Advisor Group said in its announcement.

“We’re just thrilled to have Peter joining us,” Jamie Price, CEO and president of Advisor Group, told ThinkAdvisor. What made Clemson the right choice was his long career in the fintech space, as well as his experience with direct-to-consumer and business-to-business and his work as a “technology strategist, entrepreneur and someone who has written code himself,” Price explained.

Advisor Group started planning for the next phase of its digital strategy in 2017, Price recalled, noting a key goal was to try to help advisors become more efficient in working with their clients. “The first place obviously we needed to start was account opening, so we digitized the entire workflow” and then launched eQuipt a year later, he said, noting there has been a “great reception” among advisors to its digital client onboarding.

In mid-2020, Advisor Group started to look for somebody who could help it “take the entire kind of digital footprint” of how the company engages with advisors and how advisors engage with clients and “make that entire experience a seamless one,” while “pulling the pieces together of all of our kind of advisor-based and client-based technologies,” Price explained.

Price declined to say how much Advisor Group is spending on its digital initiative, but said it’s a “big chunk of money and it’s [a] multi-year” investment that represents “a significant part of our strategic initiatives and strategic budget.”

Noting that “the industry itself is changing,” Clemson told ThinkAdvisor that one goal is to create a “frictionless experience that actually delights” users of Advisor Group’s platform.

He is reporting directly to Cindy Hamel, Advisor Group chief strategy and corporate development officer.

Most recently, Clemson was CEO and co-founder of Evati, a Chicago-based provider of digital investment advisory platforms, from 2017 until he stepped down Friday to accept the Advisor Group position.

Previously, he was senior vice president of client experience technology at Schwab, overseeing the development and implementation of digital solutions to support the delivery of a robust service experience, from 2014 to 2017.

He joined financial services firm OptionsXpress in March 2008 and joined Schwab in 2011, when Schwab bought OptionsXpress, Clemson said. While at Schwab, he also served as its vice president of brokerage accounting and trading technology from 2012 to 2014.