Atlanta-Based Firm Taps Ascent Of Independent Advisor Sector

Tom Burroughes

1 May 2023

When bankers, brokers and others break away from a big firm to set up shop on their own, they rapidly learn that they need a support network to make their independence a viable move. And Atlanta, Georgia-based Advisory Services Network has ridden an upward escalator of demand.

ASN, a hybrid platform business, recently passed the $6 billion mark in assets. It has built a thriving business by focusing on that segment of the advisor marketplace with between $15 million and $300 million who can benefit from being an independent advisor but who are often overlooked by bigger players in the space, it said.

“Scale, process optimization, and service are what fuels ASN,” Trey Prescott, director of business development at ASN, told this publication in a call. “Scale is our thing.”

ASN allows “people that lack Tier 1 firms to run their practices…we are their home,” Prescott continued. The firm can provide operations, support with regulations, and other matters, he said.

The rise of businesses such as this has tracked with the ascent of independent RIAs and breakaway firms more broadly. ASN was founded by Tom Prescott and Dave Paulukaitis in 2010 as a sister firm to Mainstay Capital Markets Consultants, Inc., which provides regulatory and compliance consulting services to the financial services industry.

Trey Prescott and his colleagues are busy. “Last year I spoke to 186 groups; this year, I’ve seen 115 groups already. We can feel the pulse of what’s going on in the advisor market,” he said. ASN has roughly a 90 per cent retention rate with their affiliated advisors.

The problems with certain American banks such as SVB has encouraged people to seek alternatives to their existing banks, and look more at independent/non-bank models for handling money, he said.

ASN isn’t backed by private equity or venture capital money. At the moment, the AuM of its network of clients is $6.1 billion, and its goal is to reach around $8 to $8.5 billion AuM by 2024, Prescott said.