LPL saw assets on its RIA platform shoot up dramatically last year, far outstripping the company’s overall revenue gain of 5%.

Assets on the custodian platform rose 80.2% to $40.9 billion in 2012, up from $22.7 billion in 2011. See: LPL sees bright spots amid sideways 4Q earnings report.

The dramatic growth spurt was a bright spot for the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer in otherwise modest earnings report and created a stir among analysts on today’s conference call with CEO Mark Casady.

“It’s certainly a very fast-growing area for us,” he said in the call. Dissecting the precise success of LPL’s RIA platform success is difficult, however, because the broker-dealer counts both fee-based and commission-based assets of hybrid RIAs in those calculation. Typically those assets have been about 50-50.

Brooke’s Note: What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say about what you do thundering so loud that what you say … ? Schwab (yes, I know it’s the foundation) has just dropped a half-million on the creation of mock trading floor in an under-construction building at UC Irvine. It’s one of a series of initiatives announced at IMPACT aimed toward grooming the next generation of investment advisors. It’s important to note that in those announcements Schwab identified new education initiatives as a mission-critical element of its RIA business and that Bernie Clark is the Schwab face of this new construction project. The Paul Merage School of Business has been closely associated with some big Schwab RIAs. Education has become a sore subject in the advisory world, mostly because there is a serious shortage of it — or even of ways to design a curriculum. But the problem is that addressing the problem is a problem itself. Any return on investment with education is hard to measure and is bound to occur way in the future. Yet Schwab execs know that not investing in young minds is not really an option ...

Brooke’s Note: Scott Dell’Orfano is someone who really knnnoooows the RIA business. So it sent a minor shock through my system to hear that, for now, it appears that he has not in it. That leaves me hopeful that he will reappear in another role in this business — or retire to become a source for RIABiz. it’s also exciting to see Fidelity doing some major tinkering with the RIA sales process. Most sales of course are aimed at bringing more advisors into the RIA business. If that art can be made into more of a science then the whole industry benefits. At the heart of all this is the effort to bring service people closer geographically to the people they serve and to bring service and sales into one accountable group for RIAs.

Fidelity Investments has stolen powerhouse sales leader Rich Policastro from Schwab Advisor Services where he oversaw sales for the company’s East Coast division. At the same time, former sales leader Scott Dell’Orfano is out at Fidelity.

Fidelity has been revamping its sales group to focus on a regional structure. As part of ...

Brooke’s Note: In the RIA technology realm we see it all the time: the smaller players embracing innovation and moving the whole industry in the process — but less often in custody. Scottrade, a small, rising custodian, is not offering a free compliance umbrella for RIAs but it may be doing something quite valuable. See: A peek inside the rising RIA custodians fighting to overtake the Big Four. As compliance takes more of a center stage in the industry, RIAs need to sweat the small stuff but they might skip some questions if they think they have to spend money or bother their firm’s compliance counsel with a potentially dumb question. I could imagine a hotline — especially a free one — being just the ticket for many a circumstance.

One of the smaller custodians is hoping to make a name for itself among RIAs by partnering with RIA in a Box Inc. LLC to offer a compliance hotline to Scottrade’s 1,150 registered investment advisor firms.

Scottrade Advisor Services, a division of Scottrade Inc., recently penned a deal with Lexington Compliance, which is owned by New York-based RIA in ...

Brooke’s Note: Imagine if there were a place where virtually the entire industry showed up to spend three days under one roof, with players in each subsegment displaying their wares but you were the only one in your product category. Pretty good, right? Well, that’s the alternate universe Schwab creates annually with IMPACT, and it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t go a ways toward solidifying the firm’s position as front-runner among RIA custodians. Yes, everyone is at IMPACT except for TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, Pershing and the rest of Schwab’s RIA custody competitors. Schwab pays dearly for that privilege but it gets some help in exchange for sharing slices of the stage. Here is what our own advertising chief, Frank Noto, observed about how that beehive of activity has its own intrinsic order — if you slow down and look closely enough. See: An advertiser’s-eye view from among the booths of the FPA convention’s exhibit hall.

Ever wonder why Chicago is called The Second City? “Because it’s not New York City” is usually the most common response from the visiting East Coasters ...

Schwab Advisor Services will connect consumers to advisors through a program that, it says, falls completely outside the realm of Schwab Advisor Network. SAN is a referral network through which Schwab branch officers direct high-net-worth investors to about 150 pre-screened RIA firms that Schwab deems worthy to handle the business.

The new system, Advisor Tool, is part of Schwab’s RIA Stands for You marketing campaign, and it is a listing service that puts some badly needed brass tacks into Schwab’s advertising on behalf of RIA custodial clients. The RIA Stands for You marketing campaign is a '“Got milk?”-variety advertising program that intends to lift clients by lifting the whole category. See: Schwab to pump millions of dollars into promoting RIAs as a channel.

Words to action

“Before there was no call to action; now they have that,” says Timothy Welsh, who consults with firms on how to market to RIAs through Nexus Strategy LLC.

One difference from SAN is that Advisor Tool may bring into the action a larger swath of Schwab’s 6,850 non-SAN advisors. SAN leads are generated by retail advertising that brings people ...

A $1.1 billion RIA in Iowa caught the eye of Schwab Advisor Services for top honors at its annual conference, but the little-known firm has been capturing the interest of doctors in the Midwest for years.

On Thursday, the San Francisco-based custodian presented Des Moines, Iowa-based Foster Group Inc. with its Best-In-Business IMPACT award, recognizing the firm’s excellence in the business of independent financial advice. See: Three suddenly-bigger RIAs explain what sparked the growth.

Founded in 1989 by Jerry Foster, 57, the firm signed on with Schwab in 1992. By 1994, the RIA’s entire business had switched to fee-only with no commission assets. Foster has 840 clients in 38 states. Of those, more than half — about 450 clients — are physicians, and the RIA has crafted a strong niche offering advice to clients who have sold their businesses to hospitals.

“We were just in the right place in the right time,” says Foster. “I met a client who said that many physicians needed advisors.” Now that he’s built such a strong firm, he spends most of his time building the business. The firm has had organic growth ...

Brooke’s Note: When it’s your job to write the of-record overview article about a the multi-day event of loosely connected happenings, it’s tempting to throw up your hands. Where to begin? The answer is to take it bit by bit and let the article unfold. Tim Welsh has done it again — showing a reporterly reserve and attention to detail — but with just enough tipping of his hand that show his knowledge of the business to add some spice. Thank you, Tim.

Long the Big Top of RIA industry conferences, the Schwab IMPACT conference brought together nearly 3,000 RIA industry participants for three days in cold and blustery Chicago this week with sleekly produced main events, many of which had a decidedly theatrical bent.

Under the theme of “Unstoppable,” Schwab Advisor Services showed off its size, strength and scale as the unquestioned leader of all things RIA. Sprawled over a good chunk of the massive McCormick Center, IMPACT activities were centered around a double-football-field-length exhibit hall crammed with more than 350 exhibitors showcasing the latest in asset management programs, advisor technology and other services RIAs use on ...

Schwab Advisor Services announced today that it is creating a program that will function as a de facto RIA MBA degree largely concerned with removing one of the very real and bottlenecks preventing orderly succession in the advisory business: The lack of heirs to the RIA thrones who know how to manage their way out of a paper bag.

The big San Francisco-based RIA custodian, currently in the throes of its annual IMPACT conference in Chicago, labeled the initiative — slated for launch in 2014 — its top-line item among a list of new initiatives. The program is aimed exclusively at grooming the next generation of RIA leaders veering away from previous custodial efforts that took more top-down and matchmaking approaches.

“Many people think of succession in terms of 'entity’ but we also think about succession in terms of people,” said Bernie Clark, the Schwab executive vice president who oversees RIA custody, in a release.

The right successor

Such a program could help solve the industry’s succession problem, which mounts as advisors reach retirement age but remain trapped in their practices and are unwilling to mount a fire sale. Advisors have ...

Liz Ann Sonders is confident that lawmakers can avoid careening off the fiscal cliff by the end of the year, but the stock market may have to take a hit to force them to jump into action.

Sonders, chief investment strategist with Charles Schwab & Co. Inc., was one of the first speakers Tuesday morning at the San Francisco-based company’s IMPACT conference in Chicago — one of the nation’s biggest gatherings of RIAs. See: What Schwab’s best three RIAs for 2011 say about how they got there.

“There may need to be a riot point,” Sonders said. “I think if there’s going to be a trigger point, it’ll come from the stock market more than the bond market. I believe the likelihood of getting a deal done is better than what the skeptics believe.” See: Bill Gross and Liz Ann Sonders are Dr. Gloom and Ms. (Fairly) Optimistic before Schwab IMPACT crowd .

Sonders, speaking at McCormick Place on Chicago’s South Side, made predictions about the nation’s economic future and placing bets on how legislators may handle this massive problem. Also speaking was Greg Valliere, chief ...