A North Carolina-based advisor with about $130 million in managed assets is joining LPL Financial from Osaic. His team is the second to make that move this month.
Cubby Bice is the advisor and founder of Bice Wealth Management in Mooresville, N.C., and runs the firm along with his brother and office manager Matt Bice and two support staff. Bice moved to LPL after facing an “untenable” situation at Osaic, alleging the firm prioritized scaling up while neglecting the back office needs of advisors.
Bice joined the industry about 25 years ago, starting with UBS in 1999, according to his IAPD profile. In 2005, he joined Sagepoint Financial. Last year, Advisor Group rebranded itself as Osaic and is rolling up its eight broker/dealers (including SagePoint) into the new brand; all of them are expected to be fully integrated by 2025’s second quarter.
In making his decision, Bice interviewed 12 firms before landing on LPL as the place to move, saying he appreciated the autonomy LPL afforded. But in a statement to WealthManagement.com, Bice said it was not simply the rebranding that “forced his hand,” but what it represented.
“The fact that they are private equity owned and trying to scale up as quickly as possible to go public by combining multiple broker/dealers to increase revenues and earnings, while also not taking care of advisor needs in regards to back-office support or technology is what made the situation untenable,” he said.
Like Bice, the Wisconsin-based Equity Design Group was also affiliated with SagePoint and Osaic before announcing it would move to LPL earlier this month. The team cited Osaic’s consolidation as a primary reason, with co-founder Jason Hohenstein admitting the rebrand added a “significant layer of confusion” for clients.
Hohenstein and the advisors at Equity Design also felt there wasn’t much transparency about who’d been in charge after the transitions. Hohenstein also felt weary of ownership changes, having been through three different private equity owners since he joined SagePoint in 2011 (Osaic is currently majority-owned by Reverence Capital Partners).
“We got tired of being shuffled around like cattle from private equity,” Hohenstein said. “We had no idea which direction Osaic was going. The only people who are going to benefit from that lack of transparency are going to be the shareholders and private equity.”
While there’d been prior reports that Reverence was looking to sell as much as 20% of Osaic, CEO Jamie Price dismissed these claims as “pure speculation” during an interview with WealthManagement.com.
Price acknowledged more PE firms were showing interest in buying into the company over the past year, which drove speculation about Osaic’s ambitions in that space. But Price stressed those kinds of moves weren’t in the cards.
“We’re not even through consolidating all of our companies. We’ve got so much to do internally,” he said. “We’re not having discussions with leadership teams or board members about ‘should we do an IPO?’ It’s way too early conjecture on that.”
In addition to the eight legacy b/ds from Advisor Group, Osaic is also moving to consolidate Lincoln Financial Group’s $108 billion wealth management business after acquiring it last year (the deal is expected to close in 2024’s first half). S&P estimated Osaic would pay about $1.04 billion to fully consolidate Lincoln’s wealth management business, including transaction costs and retention loans for advisors, but didn’t expect the move to damage Osaic’s debt ratio.
Earlier this month, LPL acquired the $100 billion Atria Wealth Solutions, which works with roughly 2,400 advisors and 150 banks and credit unions. The IBD also unveiled its expanded high-net-worth services on its Business Solutions platform. The HNW Services menu includes advanced planning, estate and philanthropic planning, and customized portfolio construction, among other tools.