Articles / Resources

When Your Broker-Dealer Relationship Goes Bad

00:00 01 November in Articles Written by Jon Henschen by rafferty

by Jonathan Henschen, CFS and featured in Broker World Magazine November, 2005: As part of a high school science experiment, a teacher dropped a frog into a pot of hot water. It jumped right out. Then the frog was put into a pot of room-temperature water on the stove and the teacher slowly turned up the heat. The frog swam around normally--until it suddenly died. Advisors are often like that frog, swimming around in ill-suited broker/dealer relationships until they reach a breaking point. This is especially true during acquisitions, where a new B/D takes over and makes lots of small operational changes. Because those changes are gradually phased in, the reps don’t notice them as much, whereas if the B/D had come in making wholesale changes all at once, the reps would have...

Hellman & Friedman – Texas Pacific Agree to Buy LPL

00:00 01 October in In the News by rafferty

by Brett Cole and featured in Bloomberg News October, 2005: Buyout firms Hellman & Friedman LLC and Texas Pacific Group agreed to buy LPL Financial Services, an independent brokerage with 6,200 financial advisers, in a transaction that values LPL at $2.5 billion. Hellman & Friedman, based in San Francisco, and Fort Worth, Texas-based LPL said today in a statement. Founders and employees will retain a 40 percent stake in the company, which has 3,000 branches. The LPL model has a lot of appeal to brokers and allows them to be better advisers,’’ Texas Pacific partner Richard Schifter said in an interview today. LPL, which has its headquarters in Boston and San Diego,has bolstered its annual revenue by about 20 percent a year since 1991 to $1.1 billion last year as individuals have increasingly sought...

Independent Broker/Dealers are Looking Good to Insurers

00:00 01 October in In the News by rafferty

by Bruce Kelly and featured in Investment News October, 2005: New York - Consolidation is picking up among independent-contractor broker-dealers, with three insurance companies again leading the charge to buy. Last Monday, Lincoln National Corp. of Philadelphia said that it will acquire Jefferson-Pilot Corp. of Greensboro, N.C., for $7.5 billion in cash and stock. Each company has significant independent-contractor-broker-dealer businesses. Combined, the two broker-dealers will be among the largest independent broker-dealers in the industry. Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp. of Fort Wayne, Ind., posted $383.6 million in gross revenue in2004, and Jefferson Pilot Securities Corp. of Concord, N.H., had $137.3 million in gross revenue.Combined, the firm will have 4,680 affiliated registered representatives, with Robert W. Dineen in charge of the broker-dealer operation. David Booth, current CEO of Jefferson Pilot Securities, was leftoff an organizational...

Making the Most of Marketing Kits – Keeping them Informative and Simple

00:00 01 September in Articles Written by Jon Henschen by rafferty

by Jonathan Henschen, CFS and featured in Broker Dealer Journal September, 2005: Weeding through dozens of broker/dealer marketing kits as I do every year, and listening to Advisors sounding off about them (a daily occurrence), I have concluded that more often than not, there is quite a bit of room for improvement! Some firms’ marketing kits are two-to-three inch thick doorstops, bogged down with mind-numbing amounts of information—plus a lot of generic claims that say little. For example, broker/dealers routinely advertise that they provide Representatives with “great service”, “flexibility” and “the latest in high-technology”, when, in truth, they don’t always live up to their claims. Flexibility? No matter what a broker/dealer’s marketing kit says, it doesn’t take long to determine just how flexible a firm really is. A few minutes on the phone with a...