The advice industry’s intense consolidation, shrinking financial advisor population and rapid U.S. wealth expansion represent both a significant “challenge and opportunity” for advisors, Osaic CEO Jamie Price said on stage last week at the firm’s national ConnectED conference in San Antonio.

“Regardless of your business model, you can be successful in this scenario as entrepreneurs,” he added.

Advisors’ main opportunity, Price says, is tied to the estimated transfer of private wealth hitting $124 trillion by 2048, according to Cerulli Associates. These assets are growing at a pace two to three times that of the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, the wealth management industry is set to have a shortage of some 100,000 advisors by 2034, McKinsey & Co. estimates.

Overall, “It’s an amazing business to be in,” he said, in a speech that highlighted strategies that both advisors and Osaic need to follow in order to thrive. For instance, he said, advisors should reach out to “investors who’ve grown up with more technology — some are high earners and are highly educated.”

“They … don’t know what a pension is and have to manage their 401(k) plans … ,” Price explained. “Use the tools in your business, and leverage technology that younger clients want you to.”

There’s a lot of talk about investors who “don’t want their parents’ advisor,” the CEO said. What that means is that “they want a holistic advisor to work with them to handle their wealth and to be involved [with them] at a higher intellectual level.”

In other words, these prospective clients have “a massively complicated life and need much more tax, estate and other advice. It’s a fascinating dynamic that points to massive opportunity if you want to take advantage of it.”

Price spoke before a crowd that included about 3,500 financial professionals and other guests, with roughly 2,500 individuals signed up to attend the event remotely. Overall, Osaic works with some 11,000 affiliated financial professionals. From his keynote speech and in separate comments to ThinkAdvisor, three common themes emerged on what his firm, and other advisors, are looking to do differently:

1. Embrace Technology

To best succeed in this climate, “look for ways to add efficiency to your practice” and address the “friction points” that take time but “don’t make a difference,” he said. “Outsource to create capacity.”

Being a holistic advisor takes a lot of time, he said. Ideally, working in a team can help advisors meet clients’ changing expectations and “take full advantage” of the growing array of tools that can boost efficiency and reduce friction in wealth management.

The CEO pointed to the recent use of artificial intelligence-enabled notetaking applications from Jumps and Zocks by about 1,400 Osaic advisors. They’ve used these tools to produce some 80,000 meeting summaries — saving them roughly 40,000 work hours, which represents time spent by 20 full-time staffers.

“That's door No. 1,” he told ThinkAdvisor in an interview after his speech.

2. HNW Push

“Door No. 2," he explained, "is the continued opportunity for us to scale holistic wealth services into the high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth" client segments.

This effort will rely, in part, on the National Planning Institute — acquired as part of Osaic’s purchase of broker-dealer Lincoln Financial Advisors and RIA Lincoln Financial Securities, completed in mid-2024.

“Also, they’ve got a significant team that deals with complicated tax, estate and that kind of planning solutions for, say, clients with assets of $18 million to $30 million," Price said.

“We can now serve a higher net-worth market than we ever have before,” he explained. This involves “going up and down the whole [wealth] spectrum and building out even more capabilities like tax and alternative [assets], which are becoming significant inside portfolios."

Today, about 20% of Osaic advisors can “intently focus” on opportunities in the high-net-worth space, the CEO says. But through its Wealth Academy and planning group, the firm “can accredit certain advisors … to partner with other advisors on big cases.”

This approach is harder to put in place at wirehouse firms, since advisors generally tend not to share such professional expertise, said Price, who worked at UBS from 2002 to 2010. In the independent space, advisors are more likely to partner with each other.

“The subset of our advisors that are already in this space can bring better value to the advisor who gets a client with a liquidity event, has all this money and needs to be handled holistically. We can support [such a client] centrally with all of our resources," he said. "Advisors who want to keep this type of client [long term] need to have a true knowledge base of what the client’s needs are."

Now CW Advisors — which Osaic said it was acquiring in June — is much more high-net-worth focused overall than Osaic and has a family office capability, Price points out. The Boston-based RIA has roughly 140 financial professionals.

3. Adding Tax, Estate Planning

In terms of meeting the demand for tax and estate planning, the firm is looking to broaden its offerings beyond general tasks like tax loss harvesting, for instance, according to Price. Osaic has a few hundred advisors who are CPAs and do taxes as an outside business activity, but not as a centralized tax service, he says.

Some industry players, such as UBS, have worked with firms like Deloitte to get tax preparation services at a reduced rate for their wealthiest clients, the CEO points out. The same is true for estate planning, which needs to involve legal advice at both the national and state levels.

"Whether CW Advisors, for instance, moves to curate a tax capability and brings scale and leverage on pricing to end clients or we build a tax capability inside [Osaic] is undetermined," according to Price. "It's one of the things … we're going to have to provide. Our high-net-worth clients are asking for it."

Read more coverage from Osaic's ConnectED conference.

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