Osaic’s project of unifying eight broker-dealer firms under one brand has been a gargantuan one, but it’s full of little stories that show its value, says Jamie Price, president and CEO of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based business.

“We had an advisor on one of our broker-dealers who was in the same building as an advisor in one of our other companies, and they’ve been there for over 10 years, and neither knew they were under the Osaic brand,” says Price, whose coast-to-coast business boasts $340 billion of assets under management. “They’re now thinking about co-locating, using their scale to drive cheaper costs, and to partner on businesses.”

Speaking with Barron’s Advisor, Price, who has overseen Osaic’s growth from $158 billion of assets under administration after its 2016 spinoff from AIG to $700 billion today, delves into the reasons for consolidating its broker-dealers over the past couple of years. He explains the company’s big swing in buying $13.5 billion-asset CW Advisors, in a deal announced this week. And he reveals that the firm’s tech strategy is positioned to take advantage of what he predicts will be a surge of AI-driven tools.

Barrons: First, I’d like to ask about the announcement that Osaic will acquire CW Advisors, a $13.5 billion-asset fee-only business. What benefits do you expect to gain from this deal?

Jamie Price: CW Advisors offers us a strategic opportunity to leverage a well-established, scalable platform as we expand our support for fee-only advisors and family office capabilities. This partnership enhances our value proposition by enabling both Osaic and external advisors to affiliate with a scaled, fee-only platform. Additionally, it deepens our longstanding custodial relationships, offering custodial choice and flexibility. It’s a win for clients and the advisors we serve.

B: Osaic has nearly completed the process of consolidating eight broker-dealer firms into one unified brand. What was the rationale for doing this?

JP: First, it’s really difficult to do succession planning leveraging our full network of advisors when you have legal entities that have to repaper client accounts between one legal entity and another. It’s an arcane rule, but Finra does not allow you to move a client from one broker-dealer to another, even if the fees are the same, without a positive consent. That means paperwork and a signature. So one reason was to take full advantage of our scale internally, as succession planning continues to be a big deal in our industry.

Number two, running companies by legal entities is stupid. All of our companies were dual registrants as RIAs and broker-dealers, and because of the regulatory framework, you have to manage these things as such. In a world where you’re watching the convergence of wealth, Reg BI, fiduciary rules, the end customer is not confused about what they want. They want a holistic, objective advisor to serve their needs. They don’t wake up and say, I think I want an RIA today, or I think I want a broker-dealer. They want a trusted advisor.

The third piece was leveraging our communities of advisors across the network. To give an example, we had an advisor on one of our broker-dealers who was in the same building as an advisor in one of our other companies, and they’ve been there for over 10 years, and neither knew they were under the Osaic brand. They’re now thinking about co-locating, using their scale to drive cheaper costs, and to partner on businesses. Think of that kind of advantage across 10,400 advisors, and actually running the company more around your customer segments. It’s leveraging our advisors with each other to create one plus one equals three. Doing lots more practice sharing, and doing it in a segmented way, versus in a legal entity way.

B: How does the Osaic branding work? Does my business card and the name on my door say Osaic no matter what part of the company I’m affiliated with?

JP: It’ll have Osaic on the door and business card, because regulations require that. Some of our advisors will have their own DBA and name. So they can brand themselves, and underneath their brand, “Osaic” is in the background. About half of our advisors use the Osaic mantle all the way through, and half have branded themselves around a named entity that they’ve created.

B: You’ve done some big acquisitions in the past few years: Ladenburg Thalmann in 2020, Infinex Financial Holdings and American Portfolios Financial Services in 2022, and Lincoln Wealth in 2023. How do you choose acquisition targets?

JP: We don’t put acquisitions in our five-year models. I never have since I’ve been here. So it’s not part of our strategic planning. But we will play in them. The way we think about acquisitions broadly is cultural fit first. If we can’t get through that door, it’s not going to work for either one of us. If we can get through the culture door, then we look at risks, and that could mean all sorts of risks. We have looked at way more deals than we have pulled the trigger on. Usually a bunch of them get knocked down for culture reasons—not because they’re necessarily a bad culture, but because we think the cultures would not fit together. We’ve acquired assets that have allowed us to go upmarket for advisors who are playing in the high-net worth and ultra-high net worth market. The Ladenburg Thalmann Financial Services acquisition in 2020, for example. While it was a scale-driven opportunity, we found its Premier Trust and Highland Capital businesses to be highly accretive to the whole advisor network, particularly for advisors who serve the high-net worth and ultra-high net worth segment.

It was the same thing with Lincoln Financial’s wealth management business, which we acquired in 2024. While they were known as some of the most productive advisors under an insurance company ownership, we did not know they had a deep and steeped planning group. We came across that in our due diligence, and it made the acquisition that much more interesting. We will continue to look at strategic things that add to platform capabilities, particularly in the high-net worth and ultra-high net worth space. They may or may not come with scale on the wealth management side, but they’ll bring capabilities to our advisors.

B: Private-equity firm Reverence Capital Partners bought Osaic six years ago and it’s grown dramatically, largely through acquisitions. How has that expansion benefited advisors and clients?

JP: I do think scale matters for advisors. You have to invest back into the business at a significant clip to continue providing tools and capabilities, product sets and ultimately, service levels. Reverence has not taken a dividend. We’ve not recapitalized the company. So we’ve been able to invest back into our business as a private company without the quarter-to-quarter earnings drag. We inherited technology from AIG Advisor Group [AIG owned the business from 1999 to 2016]. When I got here we had two model portfolios on our TAMP. Most of the business was advisor managed. Today we have a significantly more robust product platform that has been invested in with the full backing of Reverence Capital. We have a complete holistic set of tools and capabilities, which is why our assets have grown from $150 billion to $700 billion and why our advisors’ productivity has outpaced the market by a significant amount. It’s all because of the capabilities we’ve been able to put on the platform, including lending, insurance, estate planning, trust, and asset management.

Being able to do that across all wealth segments was not where we were when we originally took this business private. Today we have full cloud-computing capability. We are fully capable of migrating 100% of our workloads from our data center to the cloud, if necessary. Alternatively, since we own and manage our own data centers, we also have the flexibility to distribute workloads across multiple sites.

We outsource commodity-based services. We’re the largest Envestnet client. We are easily in the top three of Pershing and Bank of New York and NFS [Fidelity’s National Financial Services] based on total assets custodied. We use our scale for pricing advantages in the commodity places, and we reinvest into businesses we think drive differentiation and create enterprise value for our advisors, which is what I think our job is.

If you go independent and you own your own business and take risks every day with your own capital, your own employees, your own expenses, you should be thinking about whether you are growing the value of the enterprise that you have decided to take risk on. Otherwise you’d be back at a wirehouse or insurance company. Our job is to drive our advisors’ growth and productivity faster because they are on our platform versus all the other choices they have. And we couldn’t do that without the financial backing and the insights of Reverence Capital. If advisors can’t build enterprise value and grow their practices faster on your platform than somebody else’s, I don’t know what your differentiation is.

B: Can you give me your technology strategy in a nutshell?

JP: We’re watching the confluence of events that will create the next industrial revolution. It’s a combination of what’s been going on for 20 years with computing. You remember the IBM Watson computer beating the Jeopardy champion? That was 18 years ago. You take generative AI and now iterative [self-improving] AI, and it’s our view, particularly with the amount of capacity that’s been put online for cloud computing, that you’re going to see tools in the fintech area that we’ve never seen before. And they’re going to come at a pace that we’ve never seen before.

To have the ability to swap on and off those things to drive productivity for our advisors, the end customers and employees, it’s imperative that we remain flexible with the architecture. We have built, control and own the code for the entire digital layer that faces off with our advisors and ultimately with the end client. And we will plug and play both commodity services like clearing and differentiated services right into the platform for advisors to use to drive better productivity and capabilities with their clients.

One of the other benefits of being owned by a private-equity firm that has a big fintech investing capability is that we’re seeing things that are out in the marketplace that are mind blowing. We’re just scratching the surface. The public and private financing going into these things is at a scale that trying to compete with those capabilities would be a fool’s errand. Cerulli and McKinsey both estimate that the amount of wealth in this country will produce a need in 10 years for 375,000 advisors. We’re at about 340,000 today and projected to go down to 280,000. So how are we going to serve those assets? The only way to do it is using technology in a much more deep and productive way, and bringing next-gen advisors into the business.

B: How important is scale becoming in the wealth management business?

JP: I think scale is going to continue to be important. You’re going to see continued consolidation. There will remain some unique niche players that serve an end market, perhaps. But you’re going to have large-scale wealth managers emerge that are a combination of RIAs or B-Ds. I think our secret as we scale is that we’re solely focused on wealth. Some of our competitors have other businesses, like insurance or asset management or capital markets. And we are also not self-clearing, which I think gives us an advantage.

B: Can you say more about the logic of not self clearing?

JP: We use our scale and our capabilities to drive near self-clearing economics. We do that with Pershing, Bank of New York and Fidelity Institutional. We custody with Schwab, NFS, Pershing, and we have a large chunk of custody business at Fidelity Institutional. Playing more widely is a big advantage for us.

B: Can you talk about what it’s like to be owned by a private-equity company?

JP: Private equity comes in lots of flavors. They can just be capital providers. Or they can be people who have come out of businesses that are highly successful, who provide strategic insight and company insight and who also have an understanding of how to use capital and how to be financially astute for shareholders.

If you have the right private equity owners, you are bringing them into discussions on strategy and governance, of course, but you’re also bringing them into discussions about things you’re thinking about doing from a tactical standpoint.

I think being owned by private equity has been an advantage for us. The likelihood is that someday we probably will become a public company because of our scale and size. But Reverence bought us in 2019 through a 10-year fund. They’re six years in. They’ve been patient and really good partners and have been a big part of our growth. And I think they’ll continue to be.

B: Thanks, Jamie.

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