Custodian expands business-management program to include hiring, retention. Clearing firm Pershing has extended its "Ideas Without Limits" practice-management program to the broker-dealer realm with the introduction this month of "Talent Connect," a supplementary program designed to help independent brokers attract and retain productive advisors.

Demand for top advisors outpaces supply, according to a report on independent-advisor recruitment written for Pershing by Seattle-based business consultancy Moss Adams. Winning the star advisors they need to stay competitive means that broker-dealers will have to make human-capital management a top strategic objective.

"The only factor limiting the growth of the [private-client advisory] industry today is the ability of firms to find experienced and skilled people they can deploy in the field," says Moss Adams senior manager Philip Palaveev. "No matter what direction the industry takes, the firms with the best investment professionals will have the most success financially."

Offer of help

And that, says Pershing managing director James Crowley, is where Talent Connect comes in.

"Broker-dealers and their investment professionals are continually looking for ways by which they can differentiate themselves and enhance their competitive positioning," says Crowley. "Our comprehensive suite of practice-management solutions will help provide broker-dealers and their investment professionals with the tools and support they need to grow their businesses."

Talent Connect -- a program that provides analyses of recruiting trends, research, workshops, webcasts, white papers and marketing support -- is a broker-dealer-centric component of Pershing's Ideas Without Limits program, which the clearing and custody provider's Advisor Solutions Schwab unit officially launched to its RIA clients this past spring. The idea behind Ideas Without Limits is to enhance Pershing's business-consulting and practice-management-support services to independent advisory firms in an effort to win over administrative assets from bigger competitors like Schwab Institutional and Fidelity RIA Group.

Talent Connect is already proving its worth, according to Larry Gekiere, a recruiter with Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Lincoln Financial Advisors. "Pershing's marketing consultants have played an integral role in helping us develop our strategy to enter the institutional market and position Lincoln Financial Advisors' go-to-market strategy," he says. "We believe this level of interaction and Pershing's breadth of experience across all markets will be instrumental in helping [us] expand our recruitment program."

Jersey City, N.J.-based Pershing is a subsidiary of the Bank of New York Mellon. -FWR

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