The custody layer gets its own talent war

The advisor talent war has opened a second front through the firms that hold the assets, arriving in a single week with an apparent CEO handoff at Charles Schwab, a leadership reset at Pershing that saw its CEO and a co-head exit while Emily Schlosser came over from Goldman Sachs as COO, and Orion founder Eric Clarke leaving for McKinsey as Charles Goldman and Reed Colley take the board chair and the presidency. Cetera joined the churn by hiring Fidelity's Mike Durbin as CEO. Each of those moves changes who runs the infrastructure those books sit on, without touching an advisor's book of business.

PWD's 30-day tracking supplies the context: UBS lost 135 advisors, OneDigital 61, Farther 50, OpenArc 48, and Merit Financial 37, even as a five-person U.S. Bank group landed $2.4 billion at LPL, six people managing $2.2 billion left Bernstein Private Wealth for NewEdge Wealth, and a seven-person team took $1 billion from Truist to Wells Fargo Advisors FiNet. Anthony Conte brought 20 people and $1.4 billion from Cambridge Investment Research to LPL, while a separate $1.76 billion team left Wells Fargo's FiNet network for Carson Group. The volume is now a channel-wide condition.

At Schwab, the pairing of Walt Bettinger as CEO and Rick Wurster as president has the look of a planned succession, the orderly handoff the custody business was supposed to have. Pershing is the sharper reset: Lisa Dolly is out as CEO, Mark Tibergien out as CEO of Pershing Advisor Solutions, Maura Creekmore out as co-head, and Jim Crowley and Ben Harrison carry the CEO titles through the transition as Schlosser moves in from Goldman as COO. That is not a tweak; the scale reads as a rebuild, and it happened in the same week Goldman's own RIA custody unit saw its No. 2, Cooper Rey, depart.

Orion's reset is quieter but just as structural: founder Eric Clarke is leaving for McKinsey as a senior advisor, Charles Goldman becomes board chairman, Reed Colley president, and Yi-Ching Wu joins from AssetMark. Cetera's hire of Durbin, with Ed O'Brien as his No. 2, reaches back into the same talent pool that supplied Pershing's COO, and even Citi Wealth is building for the same contest by pulling Alex Kokolis from MSCI to run investments platform experience. The institutions that sit behind advisor books are now hiring from each other at the same pace the wirehouses hire from each other's desks.

The difference between the two fronts is that book-level moves are payout decisions while executive moves are infrastructure decisions: Schlosser arrives at Pershing with a mandate to rebuild, Durbin at Cetera with a mandate to integrate, and Clarke leaves Orion with a mandate to advise everyone else attempting the same. When the people who run the platforms turn over this fast, the custody business can no longer sell stability by pointing at its own stability.

Whether the new leadership at Pershing, Orion and Cetera can hold the teams that make their platforms valuable long enough to make them more valuable is the only question that matters. If they cannot, the custody layer will learn the wirehouse lesson that a book can move in a quarter but a platform that loses its builders takes years to rebuild. The teams moving next will price that difference into every negotiation.