JPMorgan Starts ‘Pilot’ for Remote Advisory Unit

JPMorgan U.S. Wealth Management has begun offering access to its new remote advisory services division “on a limited ‘pilot’ basis solely to invited participants,” the firm disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Nov. 1.

The news comes about 14 months after JPMorgan hired Boaz Lahovitsky, then with Vanguard, to lead its digital-advice program and recruit “hundreds of advisors in several locations across the country in the next two years to assist clients remotely over video calls, telephone and other digital channels, if a client chooses this service,” it said last September.

The call-center based offering is only open to clients with $25,000 in investable assets, according to the filing.

The Uniform Application for Investment Advisor Registration, or Form ADV, filed earlier this month serves as the firm’s official application to form an RIA and launch a remote advisory unit, which it identified in Part 2A of its filing as J.P. Morgan Personal Advisors Program.

The program plans to charge clients a yearly asset-based advisory fee for ongoing services, but that fee is being “waived during [the] initial, limited offering,” the firm said in the filing, which adds that clients can pen multiple accounts.

JPMorgan on Friday declined to state what the exact amount of the annual fee would be or to share further details on the filing. (News of the filing was first reported by RIABiz.)

While clients will be charged for fees tied to the program’s mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, retirement clients will have these charges deducted from their advisory costs, according to the filing. Holdings in multi-asset portfolios with mutual funds and ETFs will be based on a client’s investment profile, it added.

JPMorgan says its services include discretionary investment management. Clients “work with a pool of remote advisors to enroll and receive planning-based advice,” according to the filing.

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