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Industry Spotlight > Advisors

Raymond James Rolls Out Paraplanning Services

By Janet Levaux

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Raymond James says it has rolled out new paraplanning services for its roughly 5,000 independent financial advisors.

Its advisors can access the veteran paraplanners, who are based at the firm’s home office in St. Petersburg, Florida, on an hourly basis or more comprehensively.

The news comes about a month after Commonwealth Financial announced its paraplanning program and 10 months after LPL Financial did so.

“Paraplanning Services are designed to help advisors more efficiently leverage and scale our robust planning capabilities,” according to Frank McAleer, senior vice president of Wealth Planning. “Raymond James was founded on the belief that clients deserve advice that considers their entire financial picture, and that principle is still at our core today.”

For hourly work, advisors can transfer clients’ or prospects’ financial plans held in different software or tools to the paraplanners, who will rebuild the plans in the firm’s Goal Planning & Monitoring (GPM) program. This service could prove useful to advisors moving to Raymond James from other broker-dealers, the firm says.

Using more comprehensive services, advisors can have paraplanners create “a new GPM plan or perform an in-depth analysis of an existing plan, with the option to co-present the plan or findings to the client” or prospect, Raymond James explained in a press release.

In a pilot program, a paraplanner did a “thorough and professional presentation … with husband and wife clients with nearly $3 million in assets,” explained advisor Terry Marti of the Financial Strategies Group in Huntsville, Alabama, in a statement. “This helped solidify the relationship and could potentially help bring in some assets from family members.”

Overall, Raymond James includes about 8,700 financial professionals working with $1.3 trillion of client assets as of Dec. 30, 2023.

Janet Levaux

@Think_JanetL

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