Osaic's Greg Cornick: 'I know what we can do next'

Greg Cornick’s career has been anything but linear. From investment banking in San Francisco during the dot-com boom to helping launch the iHeartMedia brand at Clear Channel, his path to wealth management has been marked by reinvention and problem-solving at scale. Today, as EVP of Wealth Management Solutions at Osaic, Cornick is focused on harnessing the company’s resources into a unified, future-ready platform for advisors and their clients.

Reflecting on the firm’s recent progress, Cornick said, “You can just feel, okay, we’re through the platform conversions, we’re through the brand. We still got some data stuff we’re working on, but we’re at that point where you just feel the advisor sentiment and the feeling that Osaic is one company and that we are one scaled player that’s ready for the future of the industry.”

An unconventional path

Cornick admits his journey to wealth management isn’t typical. “I haven’t been in the industry that long on a time basis,” he told InvestmentNews during Osaic's annual event, ConnectED. After stints in consulting and investment banking, he became CFO of Washington Mutual’s retail bank before joining JP Morgan during the financial crisis.

A move into media followed, where Cornick played a key role in building the iHeart brand and guiding Clear Channel’s strategic reinvention. The return to financial services came in 2014, when Cornick joined LPL Financial. There, he served as treasurer and ran M&A and capital solutions.

That experience set the stage for his next chapter. In 2019, he met Osaic CEO Jamie Price and was recruited to reimagine the firm’s business development function.

“At the time, we thought, 'okay, we’ve got all these broker-dealers, and we really need to move towards a single platform that is very much around the business model of the advisor, not these legal entity structures that we had,'” Cornick said. “That journey, figuring out how we go from 12 broker-dealers to one platform with a new brand and new framework, was my first focus at Osaic.”

A new mandate

With Osaic’s consolidation — coined "Journey to One" — complete, Cornick now leads the newly created Wealth Management Solutions unit. Its mission is to align the firm’s services across advisor models — employee, independent, and bank or credit union channels — and across client segments from mass affluent to ultra-high-net-worth.

“The objective [of this unit] is to take all of the advisors we’ve got and think about them around their client base, then assess if we’ve got gaps," Cornick said. "How do we take all the pieces we have and really assemble them the right way so that we are able to address [everything] in a unique approach?”

He illustrated the point with a comparison: “If you’re an independent advisor that has an ultra-high-net-worth client, that’s a very different need for financial planning, product shelves, and solutions than an advisor with a mass affluent client. Now that we’re through everything we’ve done, we can focus on how to harness everything for these different profiles.”

Looking Ahead

Cornick is energized by what Osaic has already accomplished and what lies ahead. “I am so excited that we get to actually now show our advisors and their clients why we went through all this,” he said.

“Think of an athlete: You did the training, the blood, sweat and tears, and now you get to see how well you’re going to race. And our proof point is we actually did what we said we were going to do," Cornick said.

"Friends at other places tell me they can’t believe we pulled it off. That gets me pumped, because I know what we can do next.”