The eMoney Advisor platform will be updated with tools designed to help users suggest the right retirement products for clients based on their individual needs and preferences.
eMoney Advisor plans to enhance its platform with new features
powered by CapitalROCK’s RightBRIRDGE technology to provide clients with retirement product
suggestions based on their individual financial situations.
The Product Profiler will
utilize a scoring methodology to devise a product mix best suited for a particular
client. The tool also can compare current fees, employer contributions and
other features of a client’s 401(k) or individual retirement account (IRA)
against those of another firm’s IRA. A 401(k) rollover analysis can follow.
The RightBRIDGE Annuity Wizard helps advisers determine
which annuities available on their product shelf are best suited to meet a
client’s needs preferences by using a sales intelligence engine to scan the
best available products across all annuity types.
These new features expected to go into effect later this
year will complement eMoney’s Fiduciary Framework. This provides firms with an
adviser training platform that offers insight on Department of Labor (DOL) best
practices and discussions related to product offerings within the planning
process. It also creates a centralized location where firm-wide activities are
monitored for compliance adherence. It provides automated onboarding workflow
as well as financial planning tools, calculators and detailed event logs of
client and adviser activity.
“Providing a holistic solution from financial planning
through product selection on one platform provides streamlined and
well-documented process to support the best interest standard,” says John Hyde,
CEO and founder of CapitalROCK. “eMoney’s Fiduciary Framework and CapitalROCK’s
product selection technology dovetail together to provide a complete solution for
the best interest standard.”
“This new tool powered by CapitalROCK enables advisers to
put their financial plans immediately into action from one place efficiently
and compliantly, eliminating the need for double entry and ensuring that
planning and products are more in sync,” said Lisa Graham, product manager at
eMoney. “Our partnership with CapitalROCK reinforces our commitment to
providing eMoney users with the tools they need to streamline business
operations, serve more clients and grow their businesses.”
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LPL Retirement Leader Departure Reflects an Evolving Adviser Industry
There are some important implications for the future of the retirement
advisory industry in the organizational history of LPL Financial’s retirement
arm and its acquired businesses, particularly NRP.
David Reich is out as head of LPL’s Retirement Partners
Group, and the firm has also announced plans to reorganize the retirement-focused
portion of its business, among other changes.
At a high level, Reich’s duties overseeing LPL’s
extensive-but-heavily-siloed retirement business will be at least in part passed to Steve Lank, “executive
vice president of operations within service, trading and operations.” Lank is tasked with building and leading a new, integrated team that will essentially present one centralized place for LPL advisers serving retirement plans to access the various solutions and services LPL provides.
LPL confirms that the internal changes involve “a new, unified strategy that
aligns our teams supporting specialized clients, including retirement planning,
high-net worth, insurance, and trust businesses.” Previously, LPL says it “structured
these businesses in a way that delivered direct support to advisers serving
these niche markets. Moving forward, we will unify these groups into one common
entity that will provide sales and support to all our advisers and institutional
clients. Doing so creates increased awareness and greater access to the depth
and breadth of resources and expertise LPL has available to support our
advisers.”
While Lank will take on key parts of Reich’s role, the firm also explains
Bill Beardsley, senior vice president, will technically take the helm of LPL Retirement Partners. Beardsley
joined LPL in 2013, and has decades of industry experience. The firm is clearly hoping the Lank-Beardsley duo can reinvigorate a part of the LPL advisory family that has faced challenges in recent years: Advisers working with LPL as their broker/dealer and provider of other back-office services have been heard complaining in widely published trade media reports that it has become cumbersome to work with LPL and that lines of communication within the large organization are complicated and at times even tenuous.
Indeed, rumors had been circulating in the industry that such a move
was coming, but coverage of the top-level staff and business structure reorganization
came first from RIABiz, which reported less-than-happy commentary from advisers
within LPL, arguing the departure should be viewed “within the broader effort
to streamline a spaghetti bowl of channels in a post-Mark Casady era.”
Casady, readers may likely recall from earlier PLANADVISER coverage, was the former CEO of LPL Financial, remembered for his charismatic and at times controversial
leadership of the firm toward a siloed approach to sales and service. When Casady
retired last year, Jim Putnam, LPL’s lead director of the board, said the
choice to go with Dan Arnold as CEO coincided with the leadership team’s commitment
to investing in the business, adding that the company would focus on “improving
the adviser experience through technology, enhancing capabilities to support
adviser growth, and driving operational efficiency” under Arnold’s leadership.
It has already been noted by some advisers that Arnold
joined LPL through its acquisition of the UVEST broker/dealer—a provider of
investment services to banks and credit unions—which he led as president and
chief operating officer. And so the hope is presumably that his experience
seeing his former company’s staff and solutions integrated into LPL will help
him bring better communication and internal efficiency to the firm as a whole.
Another important part of this
history is the fact that a significant portion of LPL Financial’s retirement business
was only somewhat recently acquired, in 2010, when it purchased NRP. The historical
exercise of tracing NRP’s own development in the last decade is not exactly an
easy one, but it reveals the complicated way large retirement planning entities often come to be—and how their big organizational challenges arise.
As laid out in previous PLANADVISER reporting, the advisory brand and it’s executives started their run in
2003 as 401k Advisors USA, changing to the NRP brand in 2005. By
2008, NRP was approaching and
quickly surpassing 100 affiliated firms, and the following year the
advisory group brought on dozens more acquisitions. Then-CEO Bill Chetney made frequent pledges to race past 200 or even 300 affiliations. At the time he told PLANAVISER that NRP
was seeing such strong growth in its advisory footprint because of its “relentlessly retirement-focused
adviser model.”
“The fact is that the brokers that are leaving the
wirehouses and other broker/dealers are looking for a home, and the ones that
are focused on retirement are still flocking to us,” he said.
NEXT: Fiduciary rule
adds context
Chetney’s influence on the industry led LPL Financial to
take notice, given its own aspirations for growth in the retirement adviser
market, and in 2010 LPL announced that its parent company, LPL Holdings Inc.,
would acquire
major retirement assets from NRP and that NRP’s advisers would have the
opportunity to join LPL Financial. As a result, the supercharged LPL Retirement
Partners entity was to be led by Chetney, in collaboration with Casady.
As LPL explained at the time, the strategic acquisition was meant to
further enhance the capabilities and presence of the traditionally retail-focused firm in the group
retirement plan space, while providing unique benefits for NRP advisers who
joined LPL Financial, particularly in the individual retirement account (IRA)
domain. At the time, NRP advisers were told they would “benefit from the scale,
resources and services offered by the LPL Financial broker/dealer platform,
which will directly support the continued growth of their businesses.”
Fast forward to today and all signs are that the marriage of
NRP and LPL has not gone quite as smoothly as envisioned. Chetney has transitioned within the business in order to start yet another venture, the GRP Advisor Alliance. But
there is still the presence of great hope and expectation for what a more efficient
LPL could accomplish for itself and for its adviser force, including those formerly with NRP: The general retirement
advisory landscape continues evolving dramatically into a business where
product manufacturers are declining in clout while professional intermediaries are
becoming key influencers and conduits. Plan sponsors are relying more than ever
before on their expert advisers for help in designing and running their plans.
Yet, the advisers aren’t exactly being served to the full potential by their
broker/dealers, who are generally speaking more focused on retail clients,
high-net-worth clients, etc.
Providing some additional context in all of this is the recent hire of Scott
Seese, who will join LPL as managing director and chief information officer
(CIO) effective July 10. Arnold says the hire is about “transforming our
technology products and platforms” and “building and delivering
customer-centric technologies.” Seese was previously CIO of American Express’s
global consumer business unit, where he was responsible for “leveraging
technology for revenue growth, gaining new customers and lowering costs.” All
of these goals are surely on the agenda for the evolving leadership team at
LPL.
It is also not a stretch to imagine how the Department
of Labor (DOL) fiduciary rule implementation may be adding to the
organizational challenges faced by LPL—and indeed by other similarly situated
broker/dealers aiming to maintain and grow scale in the highly competitive retirement
advisory marketplace. Many advisers are in the position of having to
significant change the way they make recommendations and track compensation—and
the full support of the broker/dealer is needed to meet the demands of the
strict new conflict of interest rulemaking. Against this backdrop, LPL executives say a more unified business model will aide transparency and help
identify/remedy any real or perceived conflicts from the end-investor’s
point of view.
As the firm explains: “In a post-DOL world, we believe
advisers will need to align to a financial planning model to increase their
value to investors. We believe unifying these business units to deliver a full
suite of specialized services and resources will help our advisers grow their
businesses and will be a differentiator in the market.”