Midsize firm ProEquities picks custodian’s BD over its own
June 22, 2021 By Tobias Salinger, Financial Planning A midsize wealth manager seeking to expand its advisory business is taking a novel approach from rivals by outsourcing broker-dealer services to its custodian. It’s a move that falls into the industry’s ongoing trend away from commissions and toward advisory fees, and illustrates a new twist in firms’ hunt for costs to cut as business models change. The move by ProEquities to replace itself with Pershing Advisor Solutions as the introducing BD for its primary type of RIA account, the Advisory Management Plus Platform, follows several years of discussions and due diligence among the firm’s executives on the best “transformational path” to take away from its “old transactional model,” according to ProEquities President Elizabeth “Libet” Anderson. While unrelated, the first wave of some 7,200 accounts...
