LPL Financial has been widely known in the wealth management industry for decades, but it isn’t exactly a household name.
Plans are now afoot to make the firm’s brand more recognizable to retail investors, even as LPL seeks to ensure it can bring firms like Commonwealth Financial Network into its much-larger fold without losing the distinct character that appealed to advisors in the first place. LPL announced late last month that it’s buying Commonwealth in a deal valued at $2.7 billion.
It’s a balancing act that LPL executives at all levels will take part in. Not least among them is Aneri Jambusaria, who became group managing director of LPL’s wealth management division in 2024 after joining the firm four years earlier from Fidelity Investments.
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Jambusaria and her team work to ensure LPL advisors have access to a wide variety of well-researched investment options to offer clients and wealth managers, from private market alternatives to standard stocks and bonds.
They also provide advisors with support ranging from in-house research, tax and financial planning and portfolio management to custom-built portfolios, trusts, insurance and business-ownership transitions.
Jambusaria said she and her colleagues are still in the early stages of figuring out just how they can accommodate Commonwealth advisors. LPL has said it wants to finish moving Commonwealth over by mid-2026 and has set a goal of retaining at least 90% of the smaller firm’s 2,900 advisors and $285 billion in assets.
“We’re looking into: How do we preserve what makes that wealth management experience special?” Jambusaria said. “So, for example, one of the things that we’re exploring is: How do we keep some of their research capabilities intact, alongside our LPL research capabilities? Those are things that, candidly, we haven’t always explored during this type of deal.”
At the same time, LPL is looking to assert itself more in the industry. Even though its current headcount of 29,000 advisors easily surpasses those of the largest Wall Street wealth managers, its brand doesn’t have the same resonance with clients, Jambusaria acknowledged.
That was largely by design: LPL has positioned itself as a firm providing support services to independent advisors who were seeking to work under their own names after breaking away from wirehouses.
But wealth managers in the LPL orbit are starting to say they’d like to see the firm’s name carry a bit more weight, Jambusaria said. New recruits to the firm, especially if they’re coming from a wirehouse, have said that having a better-recognized brand could make it easier to persuade clients to come along.
“Part of the friction sometimes associated with making a move to LPL is having to explain to your clients who LPL is, because we haven’t been as prominent in the system,” Jambusaria said. “It’s oftentimes just another thing for advisors to do during that transition process, which can create some friction.”
Jambusaria recently sat down with Financial Planning to discuss plans to boost LPL’s brand, investment options in the current tumultous market and her work providing investing services and opportunities to advisors and clients.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Financial Planning: What has prompted LPL’s push to make its brand better known to retail clients?
Aneri Jambusaria: Over the last even five years that I’ve been with LPL, if you asked most advisors about, “Hey, should we be more prominent in the marketplace with our brand?” — most of them actually said, “No. We’re good. We’d like our brand to be kind of first and foremost.”
But over the last few years, especially as we’ve seen the high net worth profile expand, the competitive dynamics have also expanded. And we’ve seen advisor sentiment change almost completely in the other direction. Now advisors are strongly supportive of us being more prominent in the marketplace with our brand — as a brand that is in support of independent advisors and institutions.
FP: With advisors who are trying to court high net worth clients, is the goal to have a brand as instantly recognizable as Merrill’s or Morgan Stanley’s?
AJ: One thing is, if you take an existing LPL advisor who has that kind of high net worth client, they’re probably hearing from someone at J.P. Morgan or Merrill Lynch already, right? So they want to be able to have a competitive brand dynamic that they could bring to the table.
The other part of it, though, is we are bringing in more and more advisors from those wirehouses that are accustomed to having kind of the strength of the brand. Certainly, this has come up again as part of recruiting conversations for a number of years.
FP: When working with independent advisors, do you often suggest specific investments and strategies they should consider for clients? Or are they usually coming to you for recommendations?
AJ: Taking a step back, our ethos at LPL is enabling advisors to maximize success on their own terms. So the perfect type of business for an advisor over here is going to look very different from the advisor over there. And we’re really well designed to enable that type of choice and flexibility in their experience.
Of course, we want to be able to offer the full suite of solutions that advisors could possibly be interested in or need to discuss with their clients. That’s why you see us continue to grow out the capability set that we offer.
We’re also seeing that advisors who are joining our firm more recently, especially through some of our newer affiliation models, or maybe from wirehouses, they’re used to having additional support and services from the home office. They’re actually coming to us and saying, “Hey, can you provide me with estate-planning support or a [unified managed account] solution within my advisory platforms?” So a lot of this is coming from advisors asking us, “Hey, I would like these capabilities.”
But we’re 100% founded on the product choice and ethos mindset. And with our size and scale, we’re able to enable that in a differentiated way versus other firms. So we can have all the different bench experts in-house.
FP: With the market turmoil today, what are you hearing from advisors? What general advice are you giving about any changes they should be making in response to the downturn?
AJ: Our LPL research team puts out their take. So there is a house view that’s out there — our view on different asset classes and things like that.
At a higher level, we’ve been talking about volatility for years now as something to be managed, and it’s really important for advisors to be able to be deliberate about when it comes to managing client portfolios.
You know, we’ve had a little bit of a reprieve the last year or two. But, of course, 2025 has been different. It’s been a highly volatile year. We are definitely seeing an uptick in terms of adoption of solutions to better manage volatility.
So specifically, structured products and alternatives are showing up really strong in the first quarter of the year. We are continuing through LPL research to encourage advisors to consider exposure to different asset classes to better manage volatility.
Big picture, we’re looking to make sure that we continue to grow our product lineup to be able to support an increasingly volatile market environment. We launched a new alternatives platform earlier this year, LPL Alts Connect. We made a dedicated focus of growing out the alternative shelf. And again, we’re doing it for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that we know that these are the types of solutions that can be really beneficial for end investors specifically in volatile times.
FP: How do you go about deciding which alternatives might be good fits for your clients?
AJ: We have an extensive due diligence process that we apply to all products on our shelf, whether it be mutual funds, ETFs or [separately managed accounts]. We’ve applied a similar mindset to alternatives, as well.
First and foremost, we want to have a competitive set of options, whether it be interval funds, private credit, etc., and then probably with a particular focus on enabling the needs of high net worth clients.
That’s a growing priority of ours at LPL. In fact, if you look at our advisors, about 30% of them have at least one high net worth client. So, while for most of our advisors, high net worth is not the focus of their business, some of their most important clients are high net worth. And it’s a cornerstone of their book.
That’s why we have a little bit of an outsized focus on alts. How do we help advisors better serve those high net worth clients who are looking for exposure to alternatives and, honestly, might be offered those types of solutions through some of the private banks that are out there, as well.
FP: You mentioned how making LPL’s brand more prominent might help with recruiting. What do you think of the general state of industry recruiting these days?
AJ: I’m not going to comment on recruiting broadly. I did just want to emphasize, though, that I’m really proud of the way that LPL is showing up in the marketplace as the firm that’s standing up for independent advisors.
I think the ability of advisors to run their business as they see fit, and to have freedom of movement of their businesses is incredibly important.
As I think about even my role in wealth management, it’s so important to the quality of advice that they deliver, and we firmly stand behind enabling advisors to be able to deliver advice on their terms. So that means choosing which firm they affiliate with, and I’m really proud of the way that we as a firm have shown up in the marketplace as the advocate for independence.
