LPL Advisor Headcount Hits New High
The firm’s horizontal expansion work “involves meeting advisors and enterprises where they are in the evolution of the business by creating flexibility in our affiliation model, so they can design the perfect practice for themselves and for the client,” he said.
During Q2, LPL “saw strong recruiting in our traditional independent market, reaching a new quarterly high of approximately $14 billion in assets,” he pointed out. “At the same time, due to the appeal of our model and the efficacy of our business development team, we maintained our industry-leading win rates while also expanding the breadth and depth of our pipeline.”
When it comes to LPL’s new affiliation models and its enhanced RIA offering, the company “delivered our strongest quarter to date, recruiting roughly $4 billion in assets in Q2,” he noted. “In each of these models, we continue to experience growing demand and expanding pipeline which position them for increased contribution for our organic growth.”
Shifting to LPL’s vertical integration efforts, he explained: “We are focused on delivering value-added capabilities, services and technology that extend across an advisor’s end-to-end business, all for the purpose of helping them differentiate and win in the marketplace and run thriving business.
“In that spirit, this quarter, we launched a new performance optimization solution called Practice Hub. This capability delivers comprehensive data in a structured format, so advisors can better understand their performance on an absolute and relative basis,” he said.
He added: “Over the coming months, we will further expand the functionality by enabling it to generate personalized insights around additional services, technology and solutions we offer in order to help advisors enhance the overall performance of the practice.”
Additionally, he said: “Over time, we see Practice Hub becoming a key tenet of our advisor experience, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to operate as a co-pilot for our advisors. And while we’re still in early innings, we’re excited about the growth opportunities that this innovation unlocks and how it will serve as an additional leverage point to help advisors run thriving business.”
Also, he said, “As a result of demand in Q2, the number of advisors utilizing our services group continued to increase. We ended the quarter with approximately 3,500 active users, up roughly 30% year-over-year.”
New Services
As LPL works with advisors to “increase the utilization of existing services, we’re also continuing to create new services, such as our tax planning solution, which is part of our broader suite of comprehensive advice and planning services,” he said. “This new solution helps enable tax intelligent advice that can deliver material savings to clients and help further differentiate the advisor’s value proposition.”
That service is “receiving positive early feedback in demand in the market while also unlocking interesting synergies with our existing services portfolio,” he said.
“Now as we continue to evolve our services portfolio, we are leveraging our structured approach to innovation in order to address the needs of our broader advisor base,” he said.
“In that spirit,” he explained, “we are creating streamlined versions of existing solutions to help advisors who may have less complex products.”
Examples of those solutions include CFO essentials, digital marketing and payroll.
“As we move forward, we remain focused on enhancing and expanding our services portfolio to better support our advisors and enterprises and to drive growth,” he added.
LPL CEO Dan Arnold. Photo: LPL Financial