RCS Capital’s purchase of Cetera Financial on Thursday makes the relatively new Schorsch company the industry’s second-largest independent broker/dealer network by headcount.
The Cetera merger brought RCS Capital's advisors headcount on its retail advice platform—which includes First Allied, Summit Brokerage Services and Investors Capital—to 8,890, according to numbers provided in an investor presentation Thursday. The only independent broker/dealer to still surpass the ever-growing family of the RCAP Capital subsidiary is LPL with its 11,181 advisors.
The newest addition of Cetera’s 6,660 advisors pushes RCS Capital past other major broker/dealers including Ameriprise (7,478 advisors) and the Advisor Group network (5,408 advisors), which includes Royal Alliance, SagePoint Financial, Woodbury Financial and FSC Securities.
