November 07, 2023 • By John Manganaro
For many years, the story about big-ticket teams of wealth advisors choosing to leave large private banking institutions tended to be about their successful courtship by other large private banks, with top advisors frequently jumping back and forth between the likes of Morgan Stanley, UBS, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and others.
As Jeff Shipley, the founder of Lumina Consulting, recently told ThinkAdvisor, the winning bank would attract new talent (and new assets) by pushing its advisor support and client service offerings “one step ahead of the competition,” especially when it came to helping advisors stand out in the eyes of highly affluent clients.
Since about the time of the Great Recession, however, another trend has emerged — one which Shipley says is accelerating rapidly today and which led him to found Lumina Consulting in the first place.
Increasingly, Shipley says, wealth advisors domiciled within big private banks are finding their ability to deliver customized and responsive services to high-net-worth clients curtailed by more restrictive service models and proprietary product sets.
Adding to the challenge, Shipley says, such advisors often find themselves “pushed to prioritize winning the next ultra-high-net-worth client over serving the last one well,” and the collective result is a lot of “unhappy private bank advisors who are asking whether there is a better way of doing business.”
According to Shipley, the answer is yes, and more specifically, advisors who feel thus constrained are responding enthusiastically to the opportunity of breaking away and either founding a new registered investment advisor shop or joining an established independent RIA.
While they may give up the backing of some of the biggest and most sophisticated financial services organizations in the world, Shipley says, the majority of advisors who make the jump find they are happier after the transition — as are their UHNW clients.
