Osaic’s W-2 advisor channel across its hybrid and fee-only options has about $57 billion in client assets, with another $24 billion in the pipeline, CEO and President Jamie Price told an audience at the broker/dealer’s annual conference held this year in San Antonio.
The figure is a relatively small part of Osaic’s roughly $700 billion in assets across its other advisor affiliation models, including its traditional 1099 independent advisor model. However, Price stressed the growing W-2 channel during a presentation where he laid out three drivers of the wealth space: fewer advisors, rapid asset growth in the U.S. and new investors with different expectations for advice.
“You’re going to watch what happened in the wirehouses 40 years ago to today,” Price said, recalling his start at E.F. Hutton in 1983. “The RIA market is going to go through a massive consolidation as well, and what’s emerging are mega-wealth firms. As a matter of fact, it’s already happened in the independent space.”
Price went on to stress Osaic’s ability to play across affiliation models, including its independent advisory or brokerage 1099 model, its hybrid W-2 model, which also acts as a succession program, and its newest fee-only RIA option via the recent acquisition of $13.5 billion CW Advisors.
“There is a big opportunity to capture here for those of you that have a mindset over the next 10 years of, ‘how do we continue to grow our total enterprise value as entrepreneurs,’ and not just pedal faster to meet this demand and continue to do well, but not truly thrive,” he said.
Osaic’s annual conference this year is the first one since completing its so-called Journey to One, the full integration of eight brokerages starting in 2023. That transition led to defections from the broker/dealer that it is still dealing with. According to a report by Wolfe Research that mined U-5 termination filings through June, Osaic had the second-highest net loss of advisors in 2025 through June at 223, just under Bank of America (346) and just above UBS (140).
Price acknowledged to the audience the bumpiness of that transition, including launching its 2.0 technology too quickly. But as with the rest of the conference, the bulk of the discussion was on the various options for advisors across affiliations, technology and even capital raising models Osaic has for its advisor base.
“God knows, we put you through a massive change management exercise,” Price said. “But we now come out of this owning our own digital tech stack that is totally flexible, where we can plug and play any of the newest tools.”
On the sidelines of the conference, Kristen Kimmel, Osaic’s executive vice president, said Osaic was still bringing on advisors during the integration process and forecast record recruiting figures for the third quarter of this year. She said part of that success came from the work done in prior years.
“Not only did we recruit during that time, but our ramp rates for bringing in new assets [were condensed] so we were really able to accelerate that time period so we could get advisors back to servicing their clients and running their businesses as quickly as possible,” she said.
During his talk, Price added that advisor satisfaction was a key priority for his management team. He said the broker/dealer was using a heat map through Salesforce to track advisor friction points and had addressed about 150 of them recently. He also noted that, as of June, he has tied 25% of Osaic’s employee bonus to improving the advisor net promoter scores, a common gauge of customer satisfaction.
When speaking to technological flexibility, Price cited Osaic’s integration of AI notetakers Zocks and Jumps for advisors. The firm has seen 1,400 advisors use the services to track 80,000 meeting summaries and save an estimated 40,000 work hours.
“This is just the beginning of tool implementation,” he said. “If you’re not using these tools to think about efficiency in your business, I would highly encourage you to talk to advisors in the marketplace to go learn about them.”
Greg Cornick, who was recently moved from head of advice and wealth management to the leader of wealth solutions, followed Price on the main stage. Some of the themes he touched on were the need for advisors to offer wealth-adjacent services, prepare to capture the anticipated wealth transfer to younger generations, and the need for succession planning.
However, Cornick acknowledged the time pressure advisors were under, hindering work in those areas.
“Our second strategic priority is creating time in your business,” he said. “It’s the one asset that everybody in this room, everybody watching online, wishes they had more of, and, frankly, I think it’s your most valuable asset.”
He made the case that “legacy wealth platforms” created a time suck for advisors by forcing them to navigate various systems and tasks to get things done.
“It doesn’t just slow you down,” he said. “It captures growth. It limits your capacity, and it’s going to start to burn you out. When you reclaim time, you reclaim growth.”
Cornick pointed to Osaic’s new platform and integrations that can help save advisors’ time.
After Cornick spoke, Osaic leadership went on to discuss areas including Osaic’s different channel models, its wealth platform options, and new capital raising options. These teed up breakout panels running across two days on both Osaic’s services and broader practice management topics.
But Cornick, who likes to play movie clips during his presentation, showed one from the movie Jerry Maguire that felt pertinent. In the scene, a sports agent, played by Tom Cruise, extolls an athlete, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., to work with him.
“Help me help you. Help me help you,” Cruise pleads.
Cornick said the motivation for showing the clip came partly from his traveling the country to meet with advisors.
“Our strategy is built around you,” Cornick said. “It’s not a direct-to-consumer play. It’s not a stripped-down wirehouse model.”
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