Sargent Funding Group, a Bethesda, Md.-based registered funding advisor with $1 billion in property throughout 400 shoppers, has added Goldman Sachs Advisor Options as certainly one of its custodians. Whereas the RIA at the moment custodies primarily with TD Ameritrade Institutional, which will likely be merged into Schwab throughout Labor Day weekend, SIG expects to maneuver the vast majority of its property to Goldman Sachs by the top of this yr.
SIG was based in August 2018 by Brian McGregor, Christopher Sargent and Ricardo Rosenberg, after breaking away from Wells Fargo Advisors.
McGregor, co-founder and managing principal at SIG, stated his agency selected TD Ameritrade as its main custodian in 2018 as a result of, on the time, it was the one one of many large custodians that didn’t additionally provide advisory companies. However the agency noticed the TD/Schwab conversion as a chance to take the agency to the subsequent degree.
“The way in which Goldman is structured, they don’t provide advisory companies in the identical universe because the custodial companies, which for us, is a lovely prevention of what we might virtually see as type of an inherent competitors,” McGregor stated.
Goldman’s Private Monetary Administration group, which incorporates the outdated United Capital enterprise, sits in a segregated division from custody, which is housed in world banking and markets.
“Given some consolidation within the custody house, we’re seeing an incredible quantity of alternative to maneuver property to the Goldman Sachs Advisor Options platform,” stated Jeremy Eisenstein, co-head of the RIA custody gross sales crew inside Goldman Sachs Advisor Options, in a Might 2023 interview with WealthManagement.com. “Current unbiased RIAs are on the lookout for further alternative; they discovered one with Goldman Sachs Advisor Options.”
McGregor stated his agency was additionally drawn to Goldman’s ‘white-glove’ service. With the Schwab conversion, the overwhelming majority of communication has been by way of pre-recorded tutorials.
“And that’s how guys and gals who’re sit in our seat are supposed to know tips on how to take the subsequent steps and what’s going to occur,” he stated. “What occurs at Goldman is we ask questions, we arrange calls, and we’ll stroll by way of step-by-step what to anticipate by way of the transition, tips on how to put together for it.”
“Having the capability to talk with the administrators and decision-makers within the varied product strains that we are going to use may be very, very totally different than working with a big custodian,” he added. “That’s, as we see it, what it means to be ‘white-glove.’”
Goldman Sachs has been an lively custody supplier since its acquisition of Folio Monetary in September 2020 and has onboarded many new RIA groups past the legacy Folio shoppers.
In June 2021, Goldman Sachs Advisor Options scored its first custodial shopper because the Folio acquisition, hybrid RIA Steward Companions. In August, WealthManagement.com reported that Steward was within the means of including BNY Mellon’s Pershing as a custodian. Steward stays a custodial shopper of Goldman’s.
Final October, a $1 billion breakaway crew, Beverly Hills Non-public Wealth, selected GSAS as its sole custodian. In January, a crew of advisors led by Margaux Fiori departed Raymond James’ unbiased contractor division to kind their very own RIA, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.–primarily based Fiori Monetary Group, with GSAS as custodian. Then in February, a bunch of founding advisors got here collectively to kind United Advisor Group, a brand new RIA and RIA aggregator, with GSAS as its main custodian.
Most just lately, Prime Capital Funding Advisors, a quickly rising RIA agency with greater than $20 billion in shopper property, added GSAS as custodian, with plans to maneuver $1 billion in property to the custodial platform.
Some printed reviews say that Goldman is lagging behind a deadline it had for the RIA custody service, however Goldman executives stated the agency has by no means publicly expressed any “time line” and there may be not going going to be a ribbon-cutting sort of unveiling at any particular date sooner or later; as a substitute, Eisenstein stated to anticipate a quiet, steady iteration of the service.
“We knew that it might be large information,” Eisenstein stated. “We knew it was our first foray into the custody house, however there was by no means, ‘Hey in a yr from now, we’re swiftly going to open the doorways.’ We knew that we have been shopping for a enterprise that had property on it. It is probably not precisely the corporations that we have been going to finally going to go after as we are actually. But it surely was an effective way to jumpstart us into this house—nice expertise, nice folks.”
Executives say the custodian has been very selective within the groups it brings onto the platform; particularly they’re on the lookout for growth-oriented, professionally-managed groups.
“We don’t need to dilute the model, and we definitely don’t need to dilute the service as a result of everyone knows service is the No. 1 level of frustration that advisors are specializing in,” Eisenstein stated. “We’re somewhat bit later to the house—or what I name ‘strategically tardy’—however we all know what to not do or the place to not focus. And that’s serving to us as we take into consideration what this appears to be like like in an area that’s massively dominated by three or 4 gamers as we speak.”