According to WealthManagment.com, a few offices of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJs) are moving past simply leveraging scale to acquire better deals with broker-dealers to become full-service support platforms for advisors.

Traditionally OSJs have acted as an intermediary for brokerage firms and filing the regulatory requirements. OSJs have provided office space and compliance oversight of registered reps for independent broker-dealers. Many have banded together to create a large OSJ, leveraging that scale to negotiate better deals for each of them with their broker-dealer, custodian, or other vendors.

Currently, the OSJ has deviated between those relying on pure scale and those advisors that have formed national brands and provide significant infrastructure and support to advisors. In some cases, this includes the OSJ holding a registered investment advisory (RIA) firm that advisors can work under. For example, Concurrent Advisors, a San Diego–based OSJ of Raymond James Financial Services began with a group of eight advisors, who all started as consulting clients of founder Nate Lenz, pooling their resources. The San Diego OSJ now has 130 producing advisors across $13.5 billion in total assets.

Lenz says, "the main concept is to offload a lot of the non-differentiating, non-revenue-producing functions from the advisor." Such functions include transition support, digital marketing, practice management, technical assistance, oversight, HR, legal and virtual administration. Concurrent's network is billed as a way to participate in the collective know-how of its advisors, who collaborate on best practices and share their merger and acquisition (M&A) expertise.

According to Lenz, there are "worthy competitors" in the space that have truly built out the infrastructure. And on the other hand, there are several firms that he puts in the "pretenders' category." Those firms typically are existing producing teams, they focus on core functions which becomes their value proposition. Lenz shares that this strategy can work on a limited basis, but the firms are not able to scale that business.

Financial Advisor Transitions consults advisors nationwide to explore employment transition options and to preserve and protect their practice in any transition that they make.