Raymond James' recruiting outlook best since 2008

Raymond James Financial for years has been among the leaders in the brokerage industry when it comes to recruiting and hiring financial advisors from direct competitors. The firm's promise to keep its hands off advisors’ clients has been a big part of its success.

Now, with broad stock market shrugging off the uncertainty from the first half of the year caused by President Trump’s tariffs, Raymond James is seeing potentially its strongest time in hiring and recruiting since the credit crisis and market meltdown of 2008 and 2009.

That’s when the firm emerged as a destination for both wirehouse, employee financial advisors seeking to work at a firm not directly linked to Wall Street in the public’s mind and independent contractors seeking stability.

Thousands of advisors at the time needed new places to hang their shingles. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, and Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were sold to banks at bargain basement prices.

In its quarterly earnings Wednesday, Raymond James reported net new assets domestically of $11.7 billion, or a 3.4% annualized growth rate. Net new asset flows improved throughout the quarter ending in June, with last month’s activity producing annualized growth in the high single-digit level.

“Based on our robust recruiting pipeline and strong level of commitments, we are even more optimistic about our momentum and growth over the coming quarters,” CEO Paul Shoukry said during the firm's earnings call with analysts Wednesday afternoon.

“When we speak to the teams who have been with Raymond James for a long time, we really haven't seen this type of acceleration in activity since the financial crisis,” said Shoukry. “And of course, the advisors that we're talking to now are much larger than the advisors that were talking to us during and  after the financial crisis as a safe haven given all the disruption that was going on in the industry.”

Shoukry did not list a potential number or headcount that Raymond James is currently targeting. The firm currently has 8,800 financial advisors across its platform, according to the company’s website, and $1.54 trillion in client assets.

The disruptive event in the financial advisor recruiting marketplace this year was LPL Financial Holdings’ announced purchase at the end of March of Commonwealth Financial Network, a longtime independent broker-dealer rival of LPL and home to a large swath of the highest revenue-producing advisors in the industry.

Raymond James is one of many firms targeting those advisors with the hope of recruiting them before they commit to LPL.

Shoukry alluded to the Commonwealth deal as part of Raymond James’ busy recruiting schedule, but did not cite it specifically in his talk with analysts.

“There's certainly been a M&A-driven catalyst, particularly on the independent side of the business that you all are well aware of,” he said. “We're seeing success from a lot of different firms across our affiliation options. But that catalyst certainly has led to, or contributed to, the acceleration in our recruiting pipeline and our recruiting activity.”