Goodbye, Wirehouses: Why Young Financial Advisors Are Breaking Away

Career Moves February 23, 2023 at 11:17 AM Share & Print

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What You Need to Know

Historically, the big national wirehouses offered a well-defined pathway for young people to enter the advisory business.
In 2023, however, many millennials and members of Gen Z don’t want to start in a purely production-focused role.
Accordingly, the emergence of more fee-based independent RIAs has opened a new and attractive path to entry.

In a series of interviews with ThinkAdvisor, a group of young financial advisors from across the rapidly expanding Dynasty Financial Partners network explained their motivations for working with Dynasty to go independent and operate their own RIA shops.

As of the end of 2022, Dynasty’s 11th year in operation, the firm was supporting a network of more than 50 RIA firms across the U.S. with nearly 350 registered advisors and some $70 billion in collective client assets.

The organization has already had a busy start to 2023 with the recently announced plan to acquire TruClarity Management Solutions, another sizable breakaway advisor consultancy based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Through Dynasty, independent RIAs have access to a full array of capital markets and investment banking capabilities, as well as a substantial range of investment research and consulting tools, the young advisors told ThinkAdvisor. Other benefits include access to advanced planning technology and proprietary analytical tools, and an online research center.

However, as highlighted by Patrick Swift, vice president of wealth planning at Amplius Wealth Advisors, the most important deliverable that Dynasty Financial Partners or any other effective breakaway platform can provide is the ability for an advisory shop to operate in a genuinely independent and conflict-free manner.

As Swift emphasized, this planning-first approach to the advisory business is highly attractive to young people entering the industry. Simply put, many millennials and members of Gen Z don’t want to start off in the field working on commission and pushing proprietary products.

Instead, they are attracted to the team-based, collaborative approach to business building and client service that comes along with the independent RIA model.

According to Swift and others, the independent RIA space appears poised for continued (and rapid) growth, but there are also some emerging challenges that firms will have to deal with, from keeping up with the latest technology developments to identifying the right strategic growth priorities.

Wirehouse Breakaway Reflections

Patrick Swift’s firm, Amplius Wealth Advisors, is an RIA based in the Philadelphia area. The firm is quickly closing in on its second anniversary of breaking away from a large wirehouse, in this case from Merrill Lynch.

Swift himself has eight years of industry experience, including nearly five years spent building out a book of business within Merrill Lynch. Reflecting on the very beginning of his career, Swift said he was always attracted to the planning-first approach, and while he values his time at Merrill, it is unlikely that he would ever move his practice back to a wirehouse.

“At the very beginning of my career, I got involved in the insurance sales side, and I realized almost immediately that I did not want to focus solely on selling products,” Swift explained. “A lot of my younger peers in the industry tell me the same thing.”

Swift said that spending a significant amount of time working for Merrill Lynch was an important and informative part of his career. It was a big step up, he said, from only selling insurance products, but Swift still felt there was another step to take.

“There was never a single event or hammer stroke that fell,” Swift recalled. “I never woke up and said, I need to get away from the wirehouse approach right now. Instead, there were small things that came up over time, from compensation changes to service approaches, which made the job harder in the day-to-day for a planning-focused professional like myself.”

As commonly happens in the development of breakaway firms, Swift found himself having conversations with several other like-minded professionals within Merrill Lynch, and before long, the group decided the time was right to break away. In this case, Amplius launched with three founding partners who all worked at Merrill Lynch, including the father and son duo Samuel and Matthew Liebman and Aaron Marks.

As a millennial financial advisor, Swift said, it has been “incredibly useful” to be able to draw on Samuel Liebman’s extensive history in the industry. At the same time, Marks and the younger Liebman bring a different perspective to firm operations, as does the staff, which is mainly comprised of millennials and Gen Xers.

Swift said that the transition has worked out fantastically and that he and his fellow professionals at Amplius can now “truly put the planning foot first.”

“Rather than just talking about investment portfolios, the team can help clients identify and pursue broad financial goals ranging from the short term to the long term,” he said.

For his part, Swift particularly enjoys the ability to focus on tax-efficient investing and income planning, and on helping pre-retirees create a holistic and sustainable approach to spending.

Asked to identify the firm’s biggest challenge now that it is fully independent, Swift very quickly pointed to the dangers of “shiny object syndrome.” That is, even though Dynasty Financial Partners provides significant support, Amplius cannot and should not try to be all things to all clients.

“Once you go independent, your options for third-party support services are virtually limitless,” Swift explained. “It can be a little distracting, frankly, whereas at a big firm, a lot of the technology investment and business model development is done for you.”

Right now, for example, the firm is building out a better estate planning deliverable for its clients, but there are four or five strong third-party providers of such services who could be selected.

"It’s a big effort to research and pick the right one,” Swift said.

Growing Without Sales Pressure

Cyndeo Wealth Partners is another RIA operating under the banner of Dynasty Financial Partners with roots going back to Merrill Lynch, and the team also spent time domiciled within UBS before breaking away with Dynasty’s support in June 2020.

As recalled by Robby Thigpen, one of Cyndeo’s millennial financial advisors, there were a number of compelling reasons to launch Cyndeo Wealth Partners. For starters, many clients were expressing keen interest in more flexibility surrounding investments and service than could be feasibly provided in the wirehouse setting.

In addition, the independent space itself had changed a lot. Unlike in the past, by collaborating with the likes of Dynasty and its leading competitors, advisory professionals no longer have to leave behind powerful technology support and client service tools when they go independent.

Thigpen himself joined the Cyndeo team in September 2021, moving from Hoornstra Financial Group, which offers securities through J.W. Cole Financial. Like Swift, Thigpen said he values his prior industry experience before he joined an independent RIA, but he is happy at Cyndeo.

“For starters, this is a fun place to work,” Thigpen said. “Our CEO understands that we need to have younger people coming in the door, and he is trying to build bench strength and to ensure we are prepared for the future. It’s fun and rewarding to be a part of that process.”

Like Swift, Thigpen said he loves the work of collaborating with clients, but he never felt totally comfortable in a sales-oriented position.

“I think a big problem with the aging of the financial services industry in general is that you have many younger advisors who try to make a start, but they fizzle out because of the demand to immediately produce and grow a book,” Thigpen explained. "Our CEO and our team are trying to build a better approach here.”

Thigpen said the independent RIA model makes a different approach possible because compensation is not just being drawn from sales commissions or product-based revenue. Instead, the full firm and staff can share in the growth and success, and everyone can feel that they have a direct stake in the firm’s success without having to be salespeople.

“This approach just resonates more with young people, I believe,” Thigpen said. “It also is attractive to our clients. They know we are here as true partners, whether we are talking about retirement, business successions, estate planning or any other milestone.”

From the Major League to ML to RIA

Brook Hart, president and chief compliance officer Presilium Private Wealth, is yet another young advisory professional with experience working first for Merrill Lynch before breaking away with the support of Dynasty Financial Partners.

Hart’s first career, however, was in Major League Baseball, where he pitched for more than three years within the Colorado Rockies’ minor league system. While he loved the experience, the money earned didn’t always match the effort given. Come June 2014, it was clear that a career change was in order, so Hart went to Merrill Lynch and entered the new advisor training program.

“I started in Philadelphia, and I had the good fortune of sitting outside of my current business partner Jerry Davidse’s office,” Hart recalled. “I was just trying to learn from him and learn about how he interacted with his clients and just about his overall approach, because he was having a lot of success.”

Eventually, Hart explained, Davidse started to express many of the same doubts cited by the leadership at Cyndeo and Amplius. Hart was also feeling a desire to take a different approach to the advisory business, and he began speaking more seriously with Davidse about the idea of breaking away.

“It was a push and pull situation,” Hart said. “We weren’t necessarily unhappy with Merrill Lynch, but we felt like there were things we could do better in the independent space. We weren’t sure exactly what direction to go, at first, but we did know that we didn’t just want to go from one wirehouse to another.”

Hart and Davidse eventually began working with Diamond Consultants to identify the right path forward, and after considerable deliberation, they felt going independent was the right choice, and that Dynasty Financial Partners was the right fit.

“We are right now coming up on the one-year anniversary of independence,” Hart said. “It has been fun. It’s also been challenging at times, of course, but a lot of the preparation that we did beforehand really made the transition more seamless than we were anticipating. It actually feels like we’ve been an established firm for a lot longer than a year. It’s feeling like business as usual.”

Hart said his favorite thing about the new approach is the ability to act as a true fiduciary and not having product-based demands or expectations coming down from a corporate leadership structure. Like Swift and Thigpen, Hart said this approach seems to be the preferred modus operandi for younger industry professionals and many career changers.

“Don’t get me wrong, certain people will always feel like it is right to join up and stay with the big wirehouse firms, because they do provide a lot of resources and an opportunity to earn a great living if you are successful,” Hart said. “But I believe that many young people are drawn to this industry with the desire to build a business how they want to. Another factor is that younger advisors, like young people entering other fields, want to know that the work they are doing is meaningful and purposeful.”

According to Hart, working alongside clients in a fiduciary capacity allows the advisor to take a more holistic approach that benefits not just the clients, but also their families and communities, as well.