A North Carolina-based adviser with about $130 million in assets under management is joining LPL Financial from Osaic. His team is the second to make the move this month.
Cubby Bice is the advisor and founder of Bice Wealth Management in Mooresville, NC, and runs the firm along with his brother and office manager Matt Bice and two support staff. Bice moved to LPL after facing an “unsustainable” situation at Osaic, claiming the firm prioritized growth while neglecting the needs of back-office advisers.
Bice joined the industry some 25 years ago, starting with UBS in 1999, according to his IAPD profile. In 2005, he joined Sagepoint Financial. Last year, Advisor Group was rebranded as Osaic and is bringing together its eight broker/dealers (including SagePoint) under the new brand; all of them are expected to be fully integrated until the second quarter of 2025.
In making his decision, Bice interviewed 12 firms before settling on LPL as the place to move to, saying he valued the autonomy LPL offered. But in a statement to WealthManagement.comBice said it wasn't just the renaming that “forced his hand,” but what it stood for.
“The fact that they are owned by private equity and try to grow as fast as possible to go public by combining multiple broker/dealers to increase revenue and profits while also not taking care of the needs of advisors regarding back office support or technology. it is what made the situation unstable,” he said.
Like Bice, Wisconsin-based Equity Design Group was also affiliated with SagePoint and Osaic before announcing that he would be moving to the LPL earlier this month. The team cited Osaic's consolidation as a key reason, with co-founder Jason Hohenstein admitting that the rebranding added a “significant layer of confusion” for customers.
Hohenstein and the advisers at Equity Design also felt there wasn't much transparency about who would be in charge after the transition. Hohenstein also felt weary of ownership changes, having gone through three different private equity owners since joining SagePoint in 2011 (Osaic is currently majority-owned by Reverence Capital Partners).
“We got tired of being herded like cattle by private equity,” Hohenstein said. “We had no idea in which direction Osaic was going. The only people who will benefit from this lack of transparency will be shareholders and private equity.”
While there were previous reports that Reverence was looking to sell up to 20% of OsaicCEO Jamie Price dismissed these claims as “pure speculation” during an interview with WealthManagement.com.
Price acknowledged that more PE firms were showing interest in buying into the company over the past year, fueling speculation about Osaic's ambitions in that space. But Price stressed that such moves were not in the cards.
“We are not yet consolidating all our companies. We have a lot to do inside the country,” he said. “We're not discussing with management teams or board members about 'should we do an IPO?' It's a very early guess on that.”
In addition to eight b/ds inherited from Advisor Group, Osaic is also moving to consolidate Lincoln Financial Group's $108 billion wealth management business after its acquisition last year (the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2024). S&P rated Osaic would pay about $1.04 billion to fully consolidate Lincoln's wealth management business, including transaction costs and retainer loans for advisers, but the move was not expected to hurt Osaic's debt ratio.
Earlier this month, LPL acquired Atria Wealth Solutions for $100 billion, which works with about 2,400 advisors and 150 banks and credit unions. IBD also unveiled its expanded high net worth services on its Business Solutions platform. The menu of HNW Services includes advanced planning, estate and philanthropic planning, and custom portfolio construction, among other tools.