How a $2.6B team moved its entire AUM to Raymond James in 45 days
When advisors leave one firm for another, one of the biggest questions that hangs in the air is whether and how quickly they can port out their books of business — in other words, bring clients and their assets over.
Transitions in the industry can get messy, especially if the old firm manages to hold on to clients. But for Nathan Bennett's team of 16 advisors and 23 branch professionals, it was a remarkably smooth process to transition their entire books from the former Securian to Raymond James — one that other advisors looking to leave might find instructive.
"We're very thankful for high-trust relationships with our clients," Bennett said in an interview.
Read more: Raymond James bags $2.6B team of 16 advisors from Securian
A RayJay transition in record time
The San Ramon, California-based team, Summit Financial Group, had managed over $2.6 billion of client assets at Securian Financial Services, which recently completed the sale of its retail wealth management business to Cetera Financial Group. The news, announced in January, had triggered Summit's initial decision to consider other options, said Bennett, a partner at Summit; mergers and acquisitions frequently are known to prompt advisors to leave.
"We spent a couple of months doing it. Fair amount of plane flights, lots of Zooms, lots of videos, and really narrowed down the list to a couple places that we thought really fit our firm," he said. While Cetera and "several major players" that offered handsome and relatively competitive transition deals were all considered at some point, Raymond James Financial Services won out.
While Summit moved on May 31 to the independent channel of Raymond James, the move was not announced until Aug. 28 — after Cetera's deal had closed on Aug. 10. All $2.6 billion of the group's former AUM had left well before then, Raymond James recruiter Jodi Perry said in an interview.
While this is not unheard-of in the industry, often advisor move announcements only refer to the AUM an advisor or team used to manage — which can, depending on the team in question, vary significantly from what they end up bringing over in the months to come. Former Merrill Wealth Management president Andy Sieg boasted in January that a big team that recently left the wirehouse had failed to port out even half of its client books, six months in.
While it helped in Summit's case that it was independent to begin with — which tends to make it easier to move clients — its speed as a unit was notable nonetheless, Perry said.
"I have never seen a team mobilize and come together so quickly to move their assets, so completely," said Perry, who is the president of the firm's Independent Contractors Division.
"You would think that a transition like this would take twice as long as a 'normal' transition, but they actually did it less than half the time that we see any other transition take place."
Advisors in Perry's experience typically take around 90 days, or three months, to transfer over whatever clients they can. "And then you get some straggling pieces that will come in" after that point, she said. The Summit team took only around 30 to 40 days, Perry said — and by day 45, "virtually" all clients had come over, Bennett said.
Perry said that typically at Raymond James, "usually you're really pushing advisors" to get across the finish line when it comes to the tedious administrative aftermath of a move — even though retaining former clients is one of the most critical elements to an advisor's move, since those client relationships form the basis of their own business growth and income.
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"Most of the time the advisors — really, they love the relationship side. They love the investment side. I don't think I've met a single advisor yet that loves the paperwork side of our business," Perry said.
In the case of Bennett's team, Perry said, the size of the group actually played to its advantage during the move. Every advisor and branch professional chipped in to speed the process along, Perry said. "They made our job on this a lot easier because they were standing right beside us."
Bennett agreed that the group's prior model of independence had made the transition easier. "In the independent space, clients don't really spend a lot of time thinking about the back office broker-dealer," he said, adding that Summit was the name those clients identified with.
Sealing the deal with tech and culture
Selling the new capabilities of the Raymond James platforms was also an easy move with clients, Bennett recalled.
"They have a new client portal and some of those new gizmos that they get to check out," he said of clients. "They're very happy with what they have seen."
The Summit team itself was most attracted to Raymond James for those broad technological capacities, Bennett said. The firm's leadership had also come across as appealing, approachable and supportive of advisors' interest in personal development and focus on serving clients well. He added that leaving Securian had not been a "panic exit," though.
Perry said given the huge size of the team, "we were really all hands on deck" in recruiting them. "We visited with them multiple times before they actually decided that they were going to choose Raymond James as a partner. They came to visit us at the home office."
Read more: How to woo advisor talent in a tough labor market
"Culture is certainly a part of it. People seem to love the Raymond James leadership and management team. They show incredibly well during the recruiting process," Jason Diamond, an industry recruiter who is the vice president and senior consultant at Diamond Consultants, said in an interview.
Although Diamond did not represent the team in question, he added that it's common for advisors to choose Raymond James because "there's something to be said about having everything under one roof. No question."
For Bennett, the all-in-one support at Raymond James, which frequently invests in tools to help advisors grow their business — such as enhanced social media marketing capacities that it rolled out this year — indeed stood out. The full integration of client-serving tools, CRM, and onboarding into one platform was "a big deal," he said, "and the fact that they custody themselves was a benefit to us as well."
Finally, the firm's offering of access to resources for serving high net worth clients was appealing, said Bennett, who at age 47 sees plenty of runway left for growing his practice and wants to chart a promising path for younger associates at Summit to later step into.
Read more: Raymond James enjoys record quarter as other firms stumble
"They have the private institutional staff, they've got alternatives. They've got things that you feel are vetted, with high-level people making the decision, but still (allowing) access to all of them."
At some firms, Bennett said, "it's a little bit more on your own, and from a risk profile, that isn't something that a firm that wants to stay relevant and growing for a long time is comfortable with."
Perry added that the Raymond James investment banking division could also help. "If they have clients that want to sell a business, we've got the ability to help support that transaction."
Cetera, reached with questions for this story, declined to comment.
