Osaic CEO Jamie Price sees W-2 channel growing to a third of assets

Osaic’s Empowered Independence channel has grown to roughly $20 billion in assets in about a year and a half, CEO Jamie Price said, and he expects W-2 advisors will hold a third of the broker-dealer’s assets within a decade.

Price spoke with InvestmentNews at ConnectED 2026, Osaic’s flagship conference, held November 8–11 in Atlanta. Empowered Independence, in which advisors become Osaic employees while continuing to run their practices, has become a central growth bet as aging advisors look to cash out of increasingly valuable businesses.

“We will wake up 10 years from now, my guess is we’ll have a third of our business in that [W-2] channel, two thirds of it in the independent channel, both in the banks, savings and loans, credit unions, and the large 1099 business that we run,” Price said.

He counts CW Advisors, the Boston-based fee-only RIA, and Empowered Independence as the two units that make up Osaic’s W-2 business. CW, which had $13.5 billion in assets when Osaic acquired it in June 2025, announced three acquisitions this week, and Price expects it to end 2026 at about $22 billion.

Advisors trading 1099s for W-2s

Osaic has more than 10,000 advisors in its network, most of them in its independent 1099 channel, where advisors operate as contractors and own their businesses. It also offers an institutions channel serving banks and credit unions, as well as CW Advisors and Empowered Independence. Osaic’s W-2 model is largely a succession play for advisors whose practices have grown so valuable that internal successors are priced out.

“The next-gen can’t afford to buy out their parents or their partner’s business. They just can’t do it anymore,” Price said. “We’re seeing a significant amount of advisors come to us for our empowered independence channel.”

Senior partners who can’t find liquidity internally can find it at Osaic. “So we step in and own that. They continue to run the business. We back them as entrepreneurs, if you will,” Price said. Osaic will also pass on practices whose economics don’t justify its capital, he added.

Cindy Hamel, who built out Empowered Independence but is moving into a broader role as head of business operations and execution, said the biggest hesitation advisors have about the W-2 model is often that they haven’t been employees in years.

“We’re here to take off some of those traditional capabilities of an accidental CEO that they don’t have to worry about, so they can do the things that really got them into the business in the first place,” Hamel said.

External push for 2027

Most of the channel’s growth has come from inside Osaic’s network, though outside firms such as an Ohio RIA managing nearly $1 billion have also joined.

“We have been very focused internally first, and a lot of that is because it’s a different kind of transition,” Hamel said. “We do have some teams that have come in from the outside. I feel like we’ve strengthened our onboarding and our transition process quite a bit. So you’re going to start to see a lot more external focus out of Osaic in 2027.”

That push will be led by Tom Metzger, whom Osaic named its new head of Empowered Independence on November 5. Metzger, formerly head of private wealth at Citizens Financial Group, takes over from Hamel.

For external teams, Hamel said the best fits manage $300 million or more and run a high percentage of advisory business, which makes RIAs a natural fit. Osaic also targets the top 60 metropolitan statistical areas. “That’s important to us because we want to be able to replace advisors if we need to as there’s succession,” she said.

Osaic already has strong concentrations in the Northeast, Ohio, Illinois, Florida and California, Hamel said. She sees room to grow in the Southeast, the Southwest and the southern Midwest.