A senior executive for Cetera, the San Diego-based broker/dealer with a network of more than 12,000 advisors, said the firm is working to leverage its retirement plan advice and workplace businesses as an organic growth opportunity.
Christian Mitchell, who joined Cetera a little over a year ago to lead strategic growth as president of Cetera Solutions, said the firm is focused on finding new client referral channels both for existing advisors and as a recruiting draw in a highly competitive market.
“Retirement and the workplace is one of the places that we’re going to go next,” Mitchell said on the sidelines of Future Proof Citywide in Miami this week. “We have about $50 billion in retirement plan assets and just shy of a million plan participants. There’s a real possibility of matching advisors in the W-2 channel or matching them to independent advisors as well.”
Connecting workplace and retirement advice to wealth management has been an ongoing strategy for wealth managers and broker/dealers. But the desire to make the channel bear fruit has been gathering momentum recently as firms seek new ways to generate organic growth—a key driver not just of sustainable growth but also of their continued attractiveness to external investors.
Early last year, LPL Financial hired former T. Rowe Price retirement strategist Michael Doshier to lead its retirement partners division. At last year’s annual Osaic conference, that broker/dealer held its first training for advisors to get the (k)RS, or 401(k) rollover specialist credential from the National Association of Plan Advisors.
In the meantime, some of the country’s largest RIAs, including Captrust, Creative Planning and Mariner, are advising on hundreds of billions of retirement plan assets with employers, and RIA Merit Financial Advisors last year hired Osaic’s employer plan consulting head, Brian Brashaw, to run its 401(k) plan practice.
Cetera has long had a workplace and retirement division that has built its assets under administration to tens of billions, and its CEO, Mike Durbin, came from Fidelity Investments, where he was head of Fidelity Institutional.
Mitchell said the workplace is one of a few levers his Cetera Solutions team will be focused on as it seeks new organic growth channels alongside its current referral network, tax channel, CPA relationships and online leads program.
In his current role, Mitchell is tasked with growth initiatives that include digital products, platforms and investment solutions across what he characterized as five core advisor channels at the broker/dealer, which are: 1099 affiliates, W-2 advisors, OSJ affiliates, tax-focused practices, and a financial institutions channel for banks and credit unions.
Mitchell said, going forward, the W-2 RIA channel will be a “real center of gravity” for the firm, with 700 advisors now, but the potential for growth by “an order of magnitude” in the coming years, partly due to advisors moving toward retirement.
“We’re going to continue to invest very heavily in our traditional power alley of the independent advisors,” he said. “But as those advisors think about their future and succession, etc., the W-2 channels become a very good destination for those practices.”
The firm is also seeking to leverage its scale when introducing new wealth technology to its advisor base. Addressing the host of AI-driven vendors at Citywide Future Proof, Mitchell said Cetera is considering the opportunities but noted that some of the firms “may not be here in six months, or they may have pivoted.”
With that in mind, he said Cetera is currently in active “road map” discussions with some of the large wealthtech vendors about how they’re incorporating AI.
“We’re in the midst of defining what the future will be,” he said. “And we’re going to lean pretty heavily on some of the bigger incumbent vendors to create it.”
