A $7.7 billion San Diego broker-dealer is leaving the B-D business.
Los Angeles-based Cetera Financial Group has announced that one of its broker-dealer affiliates, Girard Securities, will become an independent advisor group named Girard Region.
Susie Woltman Tietjen, Girard Securities CEO, will become regional director of the Girard team going forward. “We’re excited about the opportunity to leapfrog as a company in a way that we probably couldn’t have done if we weren’t a private business,” says Tietjen. “This industry is going through a strategic inflection point. We think Cetera has grabbed a hold of that, and this is an opportunity for us to be a leader.”
With the transition, Girard and its 200 advisors become a new “region,” a team roughly equivalent to an office of supervisory jurisdiction, within Cetera Financial Group’s largest subsidiary, Cetera Advisor Networks, according to Cetera. Since Girard is transitioning to become a unit of Cetera Advisor Networks, the move should occur “seamlessly,” and Girard Securities will start to wind down its broker-dealer operations in early November, subject to Finra approval. says Tom Taylor, president of Cetera Advisor Networks.
“We now have 38 individual regions with the addition of Girard, and a majority of them were broker-dealers before they became regions,” says Taylor. “We provide for them the ability to retain their culture and unique environment for their advisors, and let them tap into the resources that both Cetera Advisor Networks and Cetera Financial Group can deliver.”
Girard is making the transition because it wanted to access the technology and tools available through Cetera Advisor Networks, says Tietjen, and because the future of financial services appears to be moving towards the advice and recommendations of independent advisors.
Girard’s advisors will be able to access Cetera’s Advice Architect platforms and planning tools, as well as its Decipher emotional analysis software and its client portal.
“By doing this, we get immediate access to all that Cetera Advisor Networks has to offer,” says Tietjen. “As we look to the challenges coming in a post-DOL world, and as our industry shifts from being product providers to being platform providers, this transition was the best opportunity to realize those two changes.”
Girard will retain its leadership, brand and culture, says Tietjen, because the firm wants to retain everything but its broker-dealer status.
Girard is just the latest independent broker-dealer Cetera has helped transition to an advisory practice. The firm originally became part of Cetera Financial Group in a deal arranged in 2014 and closed in 2015 by RCS Capital Corp, the Nicholas Schorsch-owned financial behemoth. At the time, RCS was on a two-year run of mid-sized broker dealer acquisitions, rolling many of them into the Cetera network.