LPL Financial (LPLA) said early Wednesday that its RIA platform now has $50 billion in assets under custody, nearly doubling its asset base of a year ago.
"The $50 billion milestone caps five years of remarkable growth for our RIA custody business," said Derek Bruton (left), managing director for LPL Financial, in a press release.
LPL's RIA platform was used by 152 firms with $27.1 billion in assets as of March 2012. In late May 2013, 208 firms with $50 billion in assets were doing business on the platform.
"We made a calculated decision to focus on this area back in 2008, based on the anticipated success of the then-new hybrid RIA model, which enables both fee- and commission-based revenue opportunities for advisors who operate under their own RIA firm," Bruton said.
"Our recruitment efforts have been wildly successful, as the number of RIA firms on our platform, and their ability to attract assets, has exploded. We have become the destination of choice for the most successful and sophisticated RIA firms in the industry."
(LPL doesn't disclose the number of advisors on its RIA platform, just the number of firms.)
In early May, for instance, LPL Financial said the Ingham Retirement Group became an affiliate of its broker-dealer and RIA custodial platforms. The Miami-based group has some $1.5 billion in assets under administration ($1.1 billion of which it manages); it includes 12 financial advisors and about 38 other financial profession staff members.
RIA firms on LPL Financial's custodial platform have the highest average assets under custody—at $214 million per RIA firm—compared to the top five largest custodians at $136 million in AUC per firm, as measured by Cerulli Associates in the group's RIA Service Agent Survey 4Q '12.
In addition, LPL says its offers advisors the "only fully integrated trading and rebalancing system" in the custodial space that allows RIA firms to move easily from model management to trading in one consolidated platform.
