Another independent hybrid registered investment advisor affiliated with National Planning Holdings has chosen to join another firm rather than transition to LPL Financial.
Financial Focus, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based all-woman advisor group that oversees $446 million in client assets, announced it was leaving National Planning Corp. for Securities America on Thursday morning.
Barbara Williams, a co-founder of Financial Focus, said the group wanted to partner with a firm that is friendly to independent RIAs, supports the planning needs of women and is “not too large.”
Williams and Gloria Foote founded Financial Focus in 1984. The group, which now includes four advisors, services businesses and couples, but works with many women in needs of advice, such as those who are divorced or widowed. More than 50 percent of the firm’s business is driven by fee-based advisory services.
“We go above and beyond ordinary advisor-client relationships,” Williams said in a statement. “We’ve led clients’ funerals and guided them into nursing homes. We have so many third-generation clients.”
National Planning Corp. is the largest firm under National Planning Holdings, which has seen advisors trickle to other firms after LPL, the largest independent broker/dealer, purchased NPC this fall.
LPL CEO Dan Arnold told investors he expects 70 percent of advisor production to move over in the first wave of NPH advisors transitioned to LPL. That’s a higher percentage than some anticipated but sizable groups in addition to Financial Focus have also elected to leave the brokerage before they are, by default according to the purchase agreement, transitioned to LPL.
Ten NPC teams with a total of $2 billion in client assets recently moved to San Diego, Calif.-based independent b/d Independent Financial Group.
Securities America, where the Financial Focus group left NPC for, has also scooped up other groups, like Professional Investors Network, a super OSJ with 70 advisors and $1.7 billion in client assets.
At least two other IBD teams have also left NPH in the wake of the announcement it was acquired by LPL.