Five years after starting its RIA custody business, LPL Financial LLC is holding its first-ever conference for affiliated RIAs this week in San Diego.
From the launch of the business in October 2008 with just nine RIA firms, LPL now serves 240 firms with more than $55 billion in assets.
Why wait five years before hosting a conference?
“We have a big enough community now, and advisors want to be part of that,” said Matt Enyedi, head of LPL’s RIA Solutions unit.
The meeting is open to the firm’s top 100 RIA firms, and features sessions on practice management, succession planning and the markets, as well as using LPL’s resources.
The firm on Tuesday is also launching a new outsourced compliance service, called the RIA Compliance Advantage Program.
LPL’s custody unit caters to hybrid advisors coming from the traditional brokerage world who want their own RIA firm. Of the $55 billion in assets, about 60 percent of that amount are advisory assets, the rest brokerage.
All the RIA Solutions firms are independent RIAs working under their own ADVs. Close to 90 percent custody all their assets at LPL.
“We’re certainly a multi-custodial offering because that’s what you do in this business,” Enyedi said, but many hybrid advisors want an integrated platform.
Hybrid firms using traditional custodians must use a separate broker-dealer, putting the brokerage and custodial providers at odds in competing for the advisor’s business, Enyedi said.
“We’re the only one who can be really agnostic” in serving hybrids, he added.