Raymond James Touts Competitive Edge with Affiliation Options, Advisor Pipeline

Raymond James is feeling “really good” about its pipelines across all channels, as financial advisors benefit from the firm’s technology investment and a wide range of affiliation options, according to Chief Executive Officer Paul Shoukry. 

Shoukry said on the firm’s quarterly earnings call for the quarter that ended Sept. 30, that various advisory firms are evaluating a broad variety of Raymond James’ affiliation options and further expresseds that the firm has seen an uptick in advisor prospects. 

Tapping into Raymond James’ affiliation options, Shoukry stated that its independent contractor channel “is where we’ve seen the most interest” among advisors, and there is a strong interest in their W-2 employee channel and custody channel. 

As large advisory firms continue to depart from wirehouses and enter the independent space, Raymond James is positioning itself to provide advisors with “the best of both worlds” because of its “full-service offering,” where they can fully own their book of business across all affiliation options. He says that is increasingly becoming “harder to find across the industry.” 

As far as growing competition, Shoukry believes “there’s been sort of a fallacy of assuming that the economics are binary and consistent across the industry,” and emphasizes that recruiting scale is a key component as advisor preference is “truly being agnostic into which channel the advisor affiliates with.” 

Meanwhile, he also noted that because of its $1.1 billion technology investment, there are “a lot of firms [Raymond James] compete with that just can’t keep up with that level of investment given their size.”

Earlier this month, Raymond James rolled out its Private Wealth Guided Portfolios, which combine alternative and traditional investments into diversified portfolios, enabling advisors to gain broader exposure to private markets and strategies alongside traditional equity and fixed income investments. 

Raymond James’ Private Client Group brought in $1.87 trillion at the end of September, up 1% from the previous quarter and up 12% year-over-year.

Net revenue in the Private Client Group unit reached roughly $3.06 billion, an 8% quarterly increase and up 15% year-over-year.