Clients want financial planning from their financial advisors, but many are beginning to demand much more.
Financial planning firms say they are solving this problem in a number of ways, including acquiring accounting firms, legal firms and estate planners outright.
For example, Coldstream Wealth Management, an independent RIA in the Pacific Northwest, recently decided to acquire an accounting firm with which it already had a decades-long relationship so it could provide accounting services directly. With the services now under the Coldstream banner, the in-house team is better able to service the clients, according to the firm.
“When I came into the business 20 years ago, a financial investment and planning firm did not do anything else,” Josh Harris, managing director of corporate development and a member of the board of directors at Coldstream, said in an interview. “You just did not touch anything else.”
That is now changing because clients are asking for more out of their advisory team, Harris said.
“First and foremost, clients need a financial plan, but they also want insurance advice, tax services and estate planning” coordinated and all in one place, he added. “I see health and medical service as something that could be added next for some firms.
“These types of services can be coordinated with wealth management because one does not happen without the other,” Harris said. “We want to do right by the clients by taking care of their financially-related needs and wants.”
Adding ancillary services also helps recruit young advisors to a firm, giving them additional career paths, advisors say.
“Part of our success at Coldstream is the ability to recruit and train the next-gen advisors in such things as behavioral finance. If we can offer a career ladder with experience in different areas of finance” we are more attractive to young advisors, Harris said. “The industry has to evolve.”
Coldstream is not alone in its strategy.
Stratos Wealth Partners, a financial advisory firm with $20.2 billion in client assets based in Beachwood, Ohio, and Prospera Financial Services, an independent broker-dealer based in Dallas, have launched family-office-style divisions to satisfy clients’ and advisors’ desires for more in-depth treatment.
Jeff Brown, president and founder of Stratos Private Wealth, the high-net-worth and family office program for Stratos Wealth Partners, was drawn into the Stratos family a little at a time. He started as a Stratos affiliate with an initial investment from Stratos, then received a major stake from Stratos.
“Clients were demanding more services and it turned out Stratos and I were thinking the same thing,” Brown said in an interview. “We wanted to create something that would provide the services of a big RIA.” The firm now provides family-office services to some clients.
Next, Stratos wants to add estate planning and tax planning services by the end of the year, he said. Stratos is adding a twist to the integration process by allowing firms that come on board to retain their own planning cultures while taking advantage of the added services Stratos provides, Brown said.
“We listened to our clients and their advisors and solved for what their problems were,” Brown added.
Prospera Financial Services took a similar challenge and created Prospera Generational Wealth.
"We created Prospera Generational Wealth to satisfy the demand from both advisors and clients," Tarah Williams, Prospera president and chief operating officer, said in an interview. "In conversations with our advisors we learned they wanted to be able to offer family office style services." The program started at the beginning of the year.
For the new services, Prospera decided on a hybrid program, providing some services in-house and using third parties for others. “We could consider adding other services in-house in the future,” he said. Prospera surveys advisors quarterly and also has a next-gen council to solicit opinions from advisors.
“We don’t want to assume we know what the next-gen advisors and their clients need,” she added.
A slightly different approach is taken by Rossby Financial, an open-architecture RIA aggregation platform based in Melbourne, Fla. The firm acquires small advisory firms nationwide and, in turn, provides family office services, technology and data management that advisors can offer their end client.
“We want to bring family office services down to lower levels economically, so that advisory firms can increase their revenue,” Andrew J. Evans, founder and CEO, said in an interview. Evans considers Rossby an open-architecture RIA that, as it onboards advisors and their clients, adds support for these clients that the firm could not provide previously.
At the same time, “we want to offer advisors a home they can bring their firms to if they want to step out of the business,” Evans said in an interview.
Crewe Advisors, an RIA with nearly $2.2 billion in AUM based in Salt Lake City, approached the financial planning field from the other direction. Crewe started as an investment bank and philanthropic advisor, and expanded to the financial planning field.
The expansion of the original business model was achieved by partnering with advisors and their clients to create Crewe Advisors. Clients of Crewe Advisors have access to such things as estate planning and philanthropic planning through the Crewe brand, Ryan Halliday, managing partner and founder at Crewe Advisors, said in an interview.
“We have conversations all of the time to determine which services we should provide and when we are better off going to a third party,” Halliday.
Kingswood U.S., a wealth and business management firm with more than 200 advisors across all 50 states, already has a full suite of services, but it is working to expand its investment banking capabilities in the middle market, Kingswood said. The move was in direct response to the demands from clients for access to these kinds of services and from banking clients for access to these kinds of investors, Kingswood said.
By offering these services, “we have the ability to foster activity between advisors and investment banking customers,” Craig Kaufman, managing director of Kingswood Capital Partners, said in an interview.
“Being able to provide more services enables us to recruit more high-quality advisors,” Kaufman said. “As an example, we can have access to top-tier venture funds. Our advisors can create portfolios from hundreds of companies.
“Our strategy at Kingswood is simple—we have the best advisors with access to a platform that is as good as any wirehouse,” he said.