Any time a wealth manager makes a series of acquisitions and then embarks on a consolidation process, it's expected that some advisors will look for homes elsewhere.

And few firms have done more in recent years to buy up large practices and then bring them under the same operating umbrella than Osaic. The independent broker-dealer is now closing in on the final stages of its plan to fuse eight separately acquired broker-dealers by the end of this year.

Large-scale change of this sort is never easy, so it's little surprise that some advisor teams have chosen to decamp, said Dimple Shah, executive vice president and head of corporate strategy at Osaic. In general, she said, the rate of departures has been about what was expected.

"Anytime you have a change like this, it's an opening for competitors to pitch themselves, and obviously we sit in a very competitive environment," Shah said. "We did have some advisor attrition. But I would say it was in line with what we've modeled."

On the plus side, Shah said Osaic has completed 90% of its consolidation process — which it calls its "Journey to One." Shah said the necessary changes involve much more than placing the Osaic brand on the firm's eight formerly separately named broker-dealers: American Portfolios, FSC Securities, Infinex Investments, Royal Alliance Associates, SagePoint Financial, Securities America, Triad Advisors and Woodbury Financial Services.

More than 11,500 advisors have had to be moved onto Osaic's digital systems, and the reams of data they generated in their previous practices have had to be converted into the same format. In return, the advisors will benefit from a consistent set of regulatory and compliance policies, stronger connections with their colleagues throughout the firm and more opportunities to hand down their book of business internally when they are thinking of retiring, among other things. They can choose to be affiliated with Osaic under an independent brokerage, RIA or institutional business model.

To most advisors' relief, Shah said, the consolidation has not entailed any need to "repaper." This laborious documentation process often has to happen when advisors change the third-party custodian they use for safeguarding clients' assets.

"So that part of the operational transition has been seamless, which is not what advisors experience if they go to another competitor, obviously," Shah said. "So we tried as much as possible to eliminate as many friction points as we could. But that said, it is still change, right?"

With the consolidation almost complete, Osaic has one more hill to climb before its brand unification journey will be over. Osaic announced plans last December to buy Lincoln Financial Group's wealth management arm for $700 million, a deal that was completed early this year.

That acquisition brought on roughly 1,400 advisors and $115 billion in client assets, pushing its total AUM to more than $653 billion. Lincoln's former financial services arm has been renamed as Osaic FS and its advisory arm as Osaic FA, and the integration is expected to be completed early next year, Shah said.

Many of Osaic's more recent acquisitions have been financed with cash from its private equity owner, Reverence Capital Partners, which bought a majority stake in the firm in 2019. Looking to the future, Shah said she expects Osaic's next phases of growth to come from advisors building their books of business and the recruitment of external advisory teams, rather than more M&A deals.

For now, completing the consolidation is the priority. Shah, who joined Osaic in 2022, when the firm was still called Advisor Group, recently sat down to talk to Financial Planning about Osaic's growing pains and triumphs and what comes next.

Read the interview at Financial Planning.