Since the merger was announced there has been plenty of handwringing among small advisors affiliated with TD about finding another custodian. Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger has assured RIAs that his firm is committed to serving them. In fact, many advisors custody assets on both firms’ platforms.
Today, there is more business from individual investors than RIAs, banks, mutual fund complexes and retail and full-service brokerage firms can handle. But that's likely to change as the big guys spread their tentacles deeper into the mass-affluent population.
Small RIAs could find themselves squeezed, though not for a lack of custodial options. "There are some RIAs with up to 40 custodians," Tibergien says.
That list includes banks, software companies and specialists like Shareholder Services in San Diego and Florida-based Trade PMR. Independent broker-dealers LPL Financial, Raymond James, Commonwealth Financial Network and Cambridge all have offerings for investment advisors with no brokerage business. RIAs can even open up an institutional account at Merrill Lynch.
Amy Webber, CEO of Cambridge Investment Research, doesn't even consider herself a broker-dealer but rather an open architecture platform, Tibergien observes.
[Editor's Note: I apologize to readers for the typos in this article. It was written two hours after a trip to the ophthalmologist.]