XY Planning Network is carefully weighing whether to launch its own corporate registered investment advisor in 2024, Michael Kitces and Alan Moore, the firm's founders, told ThinkAdvisor on Tuesday during an online briefing from the ninth annual XYPN Live conference in Atlanta.
During the conference's opening remarks earlier in the morning, XYPN also outlined its goals of continued reinvestment in its core offering, with expanded solutions planned for compliance, operations, bookkeeping and investment management.
XYPN also unveiled a new brand and look at the conference: a "further reflection of the ongoing growth and evolution of the network as it approaches 2,000 members in the coming year," it said.
"We are going to spend the next quarter evaluating the possibility of launching a corporate RIA for our members," Moore told ThinkAdvisor. "We are not committing that it's definitely coming but it's something that we do want to evaluate."
XYPN announced the plan at its conference because "we wanted to be sure our members knew [about it], so that we could talk to the ones who are interested in that service," Moore said.
"Historically, our offering has been the independent channel, where you're your own RIA [and] your own chief compliance officer," he explained.
"You can do everything yourself and that is not changing," Moore said. "We're going to continue to offer that path."
But there are some advisors who would rather that somebody else be the CCO and run the business part of the advisory firm so they can focus on being a financial planner, he noted.
Another factor that has led XYPN to consider the addition of a corporate RIA is that "some of the states have gotten very aggressive in how they regulate financial advisors to the point that they're stopping advisors from offering services or being paid for services," Moore said.
"So giving advisors an option to be able to attach to an SEC-registered firm is something that we're evaluating," he said. It will be a "pretty big initiative if we choose to take it on."
