A midsize wealth manager owned by the U.S. subsidiary of a giant global insurer is folding into a rebranded entity combining business lines with the goal of boosting its advisory clients.
Effective July 19, independent broker-dealer ProEquities
The Birmingham, Alabama-based wealth manager whose parent is owned by Tokyo-based Dai-ichi Life Holdings will target advisors with $100 million to $500 million in assets under management, Williams says. A combined focus on planning with a “strong insurance component” and asset management services will better serve the firm’s advisors, he says.
“We will be able to support them across that entire waterfront,” Williams says. “We have patient capital with Protective. They see a longer game in that this is a growing marketplace and they want to be close to it.”
With $109 million in 2019 revenue, ProEquities is the No. 37 firm on Financial Planning’s
Despite ProEquities’ smaller size in comparison to giants like LPL Financial, Raymond James and Advisor Group, and its roughly flat revenue over the past decade, longtime advisors praise the wealth manager’s service and the ease of access to senior management.
Bill Dowell of Birmingham, Alabama-based Vision Financial Group, which has five advisors and $400 million in AUM, started at Protective Life after he graduated college in 1978.
“They care about their advisors,” Dowell says. “It's the relationships, and that's why I’ve stayed with them all these years.”
David Allen of Orlando, Florida-based Security Financial Management has been affiliated with ProEquities since 1994. Like Dowell, Allen says he turns away frequent recruiters. His firm is one of the largest practices and offices of supervisory jurisdiction in the firm at $1 billion in client assets and with about 35 advisors. Allen qualifies for dedicated staff from the corporate office as a member of the group the company calls its ProElite, and the enterprise is actively recruiting.
“A lot of people are sick of the wirehouse world a little bit but they like the camaraderie,” says Allen, who runs the firm alongside his brother and a friend going back to his teenage years. “If somebody's a good producer, they'll make double or triple what they're making at the wirehouses and they'll still have all the camaraderie that they did at the wirehouse.”
Neither Allen nor Dowell say they expect anything to change at their practices aside from the rebranding. The merging of the three firms will call for new stationery, however.
The president of ProEquities, Libet Anderson, will be president of investment solutions at Concourse Financial Group, and the wealth manager’s CFO, Darren Guerrera, will become the combined firm’s CFO. Brad Mendenhall, managing director of Protective Distributors, will be president of insurance solutions and David Perry, chief operations officer of the distribution arm, is taking the same role at Concourse.
The merged firm can better compete given the marketplace’s move to holistic planning in recent years, according to Williams. Concourse can find “economies of scale” across the three previously distinct entities, Allen agrees.
“Proequities and Protective Life have never been ones to push their products over anyone else's; there's no favoritism toward their product lines at all,” he says. “It brings symmetry to the whole thing …Our world is not about equities anymore, it's about wealth management.”
