Solving Advisors’ Top Transition Concerns: How LPL Is Doing It

As a financial advisor, you’ve built a career around helping clients pursue their dreams. Sometimes that requires them to make a course change – and the same is true for you as you pursue your goals. Whether you want to become independent, find a better-fitting business model, or access new growth opportunities, transitioning to a new wealth management firm may be your ideal next step. Easier said than done? Not anymore.

In an interview with AdvisorHub magazine, Casey Furr, senior vice president of Business Transitions at LPL Financial, shared how the evolution of the firm’s onboarding approach is driving innovation to keep pace with their explosive growth and solve advisors’ top three transition concerns:

#1: Transitioning firms is a lot of work and takes too much time away from serving my clients.

Furr: “Since 2020, we’ve reduced the amount of work advisors have to do during the transition to LPL by about 50% — our ultimate goal is reducing that workload by 80%. We’ve done a lot to significantly move the dial — things no other wealth management firm has done. For example, instead of filling out a spreadsheet and having to manually enter that data at a later date, we rolled out an application to help advisors better prepare client data in a more efficient, faster manner. The app allows forms to be instantly populated, so an email for a client’s eSignature is sent by day one. According to our research, the app has reduced the time advisors spend on prepping client data by as much as 70%.”

#2: I can’t afford to get slowed down by technology and tools I’m unfamiliar with.

Furr: “We recently launched a ‘sandbox,’ which is our cloud-based environment where advisors and staff can learn the technology before they get here. A close replica of the production environment, ClientWorks Sandbox helps advisors and staff learn general navigation, preview reporting tools, and preview the end-client account view. In the test phase, our service team found 100% of the advisors and staff who used the sandbox prior to a transition showed proficiency in LPL’s technology.”

#3: I’m afraid of losing clients and revenue.

With proactive communication and a tried-and-true account opening process, client retention for LPL advisors is typically high. Our transition specialists have an average LPL tenure of nearly six years. They combine their extensive knowledge of LPL’s spectrum of independent business models with industry best practices to make your transition as seamless as possible, no matter which business model you’re moving to. In fact, the average transition in 2023 took 45 days, with 87% of AUM transitioned by the second month.

Furr: “Our mission with our transition transformation work is to remove as much work as possible for advisors and take on some of the complexity that remains. In the end, we want the thought to be, ‘That was so much easier than I thought.’ And we’ve had overwhelming success with this transformation — the overall satisfaction rate of advisors who transitioned to LPL is at an all-time high at 8.8 on a 10-point scale.”

Tried and True Transition Support

Change is easier with the right support. Contact us to learn how we can support your move to LPL.