Fresh off its rebrand earlier this summer and an organizational realignment into three channels focused on specific business models, Osaic has reduced its pricing for its advisors for the first time in its history. The firm is announcing the pricing changes at its annual ConnectED conference in Phoenix this week.
“We're actually also going to put money back in advisor's pockets and leverage our pricing power with the vendors and the people that we do business with because of our size and scale and clout,” said Jamie Price, president and CEO of Osaic.
Leaders of the firm announced a simplified advisory pricing structure on its Wealth Management Platform, moving to a flat fee for advisors with more than $50 million in advisory assets. Advisors with more than $500 million in advisory assets will pay nothing. The firm also announced new wrap pricing that will go as low as 4 basis points.
“We are simplifying pricing across our ecosystem,” said Greg Cornick, president of advice and wealth management of Osaic, in a statement. “As a first step, we’re making advisory pricing on WMP more streamlined and less expensive with tiered AMP and wrap platform pricing that will be straightforward and market competitive.”
The pricing changes round out Osaic’s approach of focusing on three main areas: technology, helping advisors build better enterprise value and building communities around how advisors go to market. Price said the firm has invested $100 million around these three pillars.
Osaic announced plans earlier this year to unify its eight broker/dealers under one entity, and reorganize the company around the advisors’ business models, including independent brokerage services, institutions and RIAs, versus legal entity. The firm has already converted two of its broker/dealers, Royal Alliance and SagePoint, to the Osaic brand, representing 35% of its advisor force. FSC Securities is slated to make the transition in about three weeks, Price said.
In June, the firm brought on Ed Swenson, former Dynasty Financial Partners chief operating officer and co-founder, as president of RIA Solutions. Swenson is creating and managing Osaic’s RIA-only and hybrid channel strategy along with developing a corporate RIA platform for fee-based advisors. About a quarter of the assets on the firm’s advisory platform are with independent RIAs.
Swenson will also be building out a W2 employee affiliation model for RIAs who use Osaic. Advisors who choose to affiliate that way will come under Osaic’s corporate RIA.
Osaic’s new suite of capital solutions, which it is unveiling at the conference this week, is one way it hopes to expand its relationships with RIAs. The firm will use its balance sheet capital and invest it behind advisors’ growth initiatives. Price was light on the details of the new program, other than to say that it could be a line of credit, a growth loan, or in the form of helping advisors facilitate more aggressive inorganic growth.
Osaic made its first foray into the M&A space about a year ago when it took a minority investment in Signature Estate & Investment Advisors, a Los Angeles-based hybrid RIA, alongside Reverence Capital Partners, the b/d network’s majority owner.
Other broker/dealers in the space have similar capital programs, including Commonwealth, which just recently expanded its Entrepreneurial Capital program. LPL Financial launched its suite of M&A solutions in 2021.
“In a general sense, firms are trying to evolve with the marketplace,” said Jodie Papike, CEO and managing partner of Cross-Search. “And we have so many advisors that are on the cusp of retirement, or at least within five years of retirement that firms are trying to figure out how to capitalize on that so that someone doesn’t have to leave their firm and take their assets with them to join an advisor that’s going to buy them somewhere else.
“The whole play, or the game at this point is, ‘How do we come up with a way to keep those advisors here, when they do decide that it’s time to retire?’”
On the technology front, at ConnectED, Osaic advisors will get a first look at the firm’s new advisor portal, OneHub, featuring a single digital interface. This is the landing page that an advisor will go onto as they start their day, and it has been redesigned for better productivity and better analytical capabilities. It has also been outfitted for easier functionality around customization applications that advisors can download and use through a single sign-on capability.
Advisors will also be able to look at Support Center, the firm’s service platform. The legacy Advisor Group firms have already been using the platform for the last six months, but it will be deployed across the old Ladenburg Thalmann firms as they convert to Osaic.
Osaic has already deployed eQuipt, its digital account opening platform, to the legacy Advisor Group broker/dealers. But the Ladenburg firms will also get access to it in January, even if they haven’t converted.
For that third pillar, helping advisors create enterprise value, the firm has tapped Gerald Schreck, a former head of education and development at UBS Wealth Management Americas, to serve as a senior vice president of advisor education and training. Schreck built all the accreditation and training programs for UBS for private wealth and high-net-worth advisors. He’ll do something similar at Osaic, Price said, to help the firm move from just providing practice management capabilities to helping advisors grow enterprise value as entrepreneurs.
“They're taking capital risk every day. Many of them own their own offices, their own staff, and are they leveraging the full capability of their businesses to create true full value for themselves, their business partners, their families, etc. And we think that is a main part of our partnership with them,” Price said.