The 6,600 advisors in Cetera Financial Groups network were caught by surprise Thursday by
Im sure my advisors are going to be aggravated, says John Brackett, referring to the hundreds of advisors he manages at San Francisco practice BAR Financial.
He got the news from one of his East Coast representatives in the morning just as he was stepping off an exercise bike. I was like, What? Brackett says.
Neither Cetera Chief Executive Valerie Brown nor Nicholas Schorsch, chairman of RCS Capital, responded to multiple requests for comment on the deal in general, or on Cetera advisors' reaction in particular.
If approved by regulators, the $1.15 billion deal would make RCS Capital, also known as RCAP Holdings, the equivalent of the second-largest independent broker-dealer in the country -- after LPL Financial -- by number of advisors. The newly combined retail advice platform will have approximately $1.7 billion in revenue, 8,900 advisors, $191 billion in assets and 2.6 million clients, company executives said at Thursday's press conference.
The Cetera deal comes on the heels of RCAPs
FOLLOWING A REBRAND
The deal took some Cetera advisors aback, partly because the four firms that make up the Cetera network went through a
We just went through all that crap, Brackett says. I dont want to do that again.
But he and other Cetera advisors also think the RCAP deal could be a good thing. After having listened to a conference call with the leadership of Cetera and its current parent, private equity firm Lightyear Capital, advisor Dave Hubbard concludes that its going to be business as usual on a day-to-day basis. They are going to do what they can to help us grow.
Hubbard, the president of Exemplar Financial Network in Crystal Lake, Ill., also praised the leadership of RCAP -- which, until it began acquiring independent B-Ds last year, was best known as an innovator in non-traded REITs -- as very creative entrepreneurial people that have done remarkable things in the real estate area.
Time will tell as to how the B-D acquisitions work out, Hubbard says. But if they keep all of our management in place, youve got some of the best management in the business running our firm.
That's one of the reasons that Cameron Thornton of Cameron Thornton Associates in Burbank, Calif., says he's excited about Cetera's new owners.
"Being acquired by a company of the stature of RCAP, I think its going to be terrific," Thornton says. "My understanding is there will be absolutely no change in the Cetera leadership. There will be no change on the field."
DEAL ENDS IPO SPECULATION
The deal also ends a guessing game about when Cetera's private equity ownership would spin the network off as a public company; RCAP is already publicly traded. We know the endgame now, Brackett says.
He says hes not worried about the management of Cetera going forward. His firms IBD has been bought out three times thus far, he says, and none of these transactions materially affected its performance.
From my perspective, I dont really give a crap. At BAR Financial, we are big enough, Brackett says. So now I am going to sit back and say [to RCAP], Who are you? What do you want from me?"
If the answer isnt satisfactory, Hubbard says, advisors can always leave. If something happened, he says, we would have options to do something different.
Read more:
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