Young financial advisors want to find their own voice, they want the freedom to innovate and they want to create a message that strengthens their relationships with their clients.
And to make it all happen, they are ditching big wirehouses in favor of being their own boss, according to Pam Stross, CEO of TruClarity Wealth Advisors, a Tampa-based RIA that provides a platform and tuck-in option for advisors ready to break away from restrictive wirehouses.
“It’s just been really exciting for us to see younger people take on something where they are going to build something for themselves over a fairly substantial period of time,” Stross said.
She explained the goal of TruClarity Wealth Advisors, which launched in September, is to make the advisor’s tuck-in experience seamless by taking care of compliance, HR, custodial relationships and other operational components for advisors so they can focus on clients.
Stross said in the past year and a half, TruClarity Wealth Advisors and its support platform, TruClarity Management Solutions, have seen a high number of advisors in their late 30s and early 40s – well below the average age of 56.5 – looking toward independence.
In the process of launching three teams with many millennial advisors, Stross explained that TruClarity began to take notice at what was driving the younger advisors – who in many cases have not been in long enough to grow a significant book – to look for independence. She said she polled young advisors both on the platform and those coming on the platform to understand why advisors were taking the leap.
“And we got some of the same answers that we would get from any advisors, and obviously there was a lot of things there that dealt with having ownership, having something that they can make relatable and a personal brand to the clients,” she said.
Stross added these young advisors don’t want to be associated with the word or logo of the big wirehouses. “They want something that truly tells more about them and what they want to do, and how they want to serve you as a financial advisor,” she said.
Technology, Stross pointed out, is important to these millennial advisors. “I think the strength of technology within the independent space is something that they are all very excited about because there is such amazing technology available in the RIA side of the business and that will get stronger every year, she said. “And especially when you look at some of the older legacy software that you might see in the larger institutions, I think they feel like they have the freedom to innovate.”
Stross said recently she had a discussion with one of her clients who said how much the clients love that they can sit in their living room in pajamas and have a video conference call with them. Another thing that’s important to this generation of advisors is being able to move to a paperless office using DocuSign and all the other available tools.