Retail Brokerage and Distribution Report—Canada Winter 2018

If experience is a good teacher, what can we learn from the advisor force in the FSB channel? With 37% of present-day advisors having more than 20 years’ of industry experience, or tenure,—which is the highest proportion of advisor experience recorded to date—advisor retirement is one of the major strategic challenges among dealers in the full-service brokerage (FSB) channel. Given the concentrated share of assets (50%) among that long-tenured group, advisor retirement has become one of the major strategic challenges among dealers in the FSB channel. How are the major FSB firms juggling the challenge of balancing the books of business and production levels of experienced advisors with realizing the future potential of the up-and-coming advisor cohort building their practices?

Revisiting this topic, which was last discussed in the Summer 2013 issue of the Retail Brokerage Report, we address these questions through both in-depth discussions and via the collection of detailed advisor data gathered from a large sample of FSB firms. Other key areas of focus in our current research include advisor recruitment, succession planning and the role of advisor teams in integrating the recruits and the veterans.

The feature is an important read for distributor firms, which are tasked with the challenges of advisor tenure leading to retirement, but which also seek to capitalize on the potential opportunities that lie ahead.