What is LPL Financial?
As the nation’s leading independent broker-dealer*, LPL Financial offers an integrated platform of proprietary technology, brokerage, and investment advisor services to more than 14,000 financial advisors and approximately 700 financial institutions. They also support more than 4,000 other financial advisors with customized clearing solutions, advisory platforms, and technology.
What does LPL Financial Provide?
LPL Financial serves as our back office support and brokerage service. Think of it like a football team: our advisors work with you in a coaching capacity, with LPL serving as the team that carries out the plays. They also enable us to offer a variety of other benefits:
- Integrated technology — Our integrated, web-based technology platform allows customers to manage critical aspects of their business while remaining highly efficient and responsive to their clients’ needs. Time-consuming processes—such as account opening and management, document imaging, transaction execution, and account rebalancing—are automated to improve efficiency and accuracy. With LPL focused on technology, advisors are able to focus on what is most important: Meeting client investment objectives.
- Independent research — Our Research team provides objective research on mutual funds, separate accounts, annuities, alternative investments, equities, fixed-income securities, and more. With a focus on performance, service, and transparency, our research team delivers timely perspectives on the ever-changing economic marketplace, helping advisors to help their clients understand and adjust to the latest developments.
- Practice management programs and training — LPL constantly seeks ways to help customers increase their service to their clients. Our experience and leadership in our industry, as well as the size and diversity of our customer base, give us the ability to benchmark the best practices of successful financial advisors and financial institution-based investment programs. In addition, we are able to dedicate an experienced and diverse set of professionals to work with customers, helping them to build and manage their business and client relationships through one-on-one consulting and group training.
- Comprehensive clearing and compliance services — LPL custodies and clears the majority of our customers’ transactions, providing an enhanced customer experience and expedited processing capabilities—all backed by robust and responsive service center and operations organizations focused on providing timely, accurate, and consistent support.
In addition, our 300-person Compliance team provides oversight of many diverse compliance and monitoring requirements. We serve as a true business partner to our advisors, working closely with them and acting proactively on their behalf so they can run a compliant practice. By seamlessly integrating compliance functionality into our advisors’ practices, we enable many of their procedures to be fully automated. With LPL focusing on back-office service and support, advisors are able to focus on their clients’ future rather than on logistics.
* As reported by Financial Planning magazine, June 1996-2016, based on total revenue.