Transition Comparison

Your Easiest Transition Option

LPL is your easiest option. Period. Other broker-dealers may offer transition packages that seem higher than what we’re offering – because their process is more complicated. Don’t forget to factor in the cost of repapering, moving accounts, ramp time, and more.

Here are two key benefits of choosing LPL:

We’ll take care of automatically moving the vast majority of your advisory, brokerage, and direct business accounts for you. For advisory and brokerage, this process is called a tape-to-tape conversion. For direct business, it’s called a block transfer.

You may hear or see those terms a few times during your onboarding. These are FINRA-sanctioned and regulated, and we’re able to do this as a result of this broker-dealer shutdown.

We’re familiar with this process since we often follow it when a new bank or credit union joins our firm or when we partner with other firms shutting down their broker-dealers. We process about five to ten tape-to-tape conversions and about 40 block transfers every year. Many of those are conversions coming from Pershing.

For you and your clients:

  • A minimal number of forms to fill out and sign.
  • Your clients are mailed a negative consent letter (that we coordinate so you don’t have to), so their accounts will move to LPL unless they specifically opt out.1

At any other broker-dealer, you’ll have to obtain positive consent from every client and manually move their accounts. That means you’ll have to contact each client, have them fill out and sign forms, submit those forms back to the new broker-dealer, and in the case of direct business, change the broker-dealer of record at the sponsor firm. And most importantly, you won’t receive revenue until all accounts are open and in good order.   

At LPL, you’ll have no gap in revenue in most cases. You’ll continue to earn revenue on brokerage and direct assets regardless of any required paperwork for 180 days due to the nature of this conversion.

1Less than 1% of clients opt out of a transfer because they want to stay with you as their advisor.

We’ve done our due diligence and have predetermined if we’ll need to resolve any issues with your existing marketing materials, website, or outside business accounts. In most cases, you’ll just need to update Waddell & Reed’s disclosure to LPL’s disclosure.

If we do have any questions or concerns, we’ll schedule one single call to resolve them.

At another broker-dealer, the onboarding process will likely include an intense scrutiny of your marketing and outside business accounts, fingerprinting, and a thorough compliance review.