Osaic CEO Jamie Price says that during his firm's "Journey to One" consolidation of several formerly independent broker-dealers, his wife picked up and ran with his joking reference to it as a "journey through hell."
Now, more than a year after the
Osaic's Journey to One was an ambitious plan to pull together initially eight, and eventually nine, brokerages that existed separately under the firm's corporate structure. For the eight formerly independent firms first included — American Portfolios, FSC Securities, Infinex Investments, Royal Alliance Associates, SagePoint Financial, Securities America, Triad Advisors and Woodbury Financial Services — headcount losses rose by 23% from the start of Journey to One in 2023 to its conclusion less than two years later. Those departures were later augmented by advisors leaving former affiliates of Lincoln Financial, whose
(Despite the name Journey to One, Osaic still maintains two internal brokerages separate from its Osaic Wealth main brokerage: Osaic Services and Osaic Institutions, the latter of which works primarily with banks, credit unions and similar firms.)
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The genesis of and impetus for Journey to One
Price told Financial Planning that the decision to embark on Journey to One was made almost entirely by him and his fellow executives. He rejected the suggestion that he was in any way forced into Journey to One by Osaic's private equity owner, Reverence Capital Partners.
Price said he recognized the need for internal consolidation shortly after becoming CEO of the firm then known as Advisor Group in 2016 (
The problem was perhaps most evident in Advisor Group's technology.
"No CEO would walk into our company and say, 'God, I've been dying to have nine operating systems, three tech stacks, two commission systems,'" Price said.
Retiring advisors wanting to hand down their books of business to colleagues also ran into difficulties when moving assets across different internal broker-dealers, Price said. Sometimes the separate legal entities would even be pitted against each other in quasi-recruiting skirmishes for a particular advisor or team.
Price acknowledged that private equity firms like the ones that have owned Osaic since 2016 often aim to simplify internal structures to cut costs and later sell for a profit. In Osaic's case, though, he insists he was the one pushing for consolidation through Journey to One. The private equity investors mainly had to be convinced the risks weren't too great.
"Look, going through that change, one thing we know for certain is that our competitors would
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Where the departing advisors landed
The biggest destination for departing Osaic advisors has been LPL Financial, according to AdvizorPro. The 32,000-plus headcount broker-dealer, the largest in the industry by
But not all those who left Osaic continued to work in wealth management, Price said. Some either retired or had so little in the way of client assets and revenue production that they decided it was time to quit the industry.
Industry sources familiar with the departures also said Osaic clashed with some of its large advisory groups known as
Osaic's own recruiting has helped backfill many of the departures, Price said. An even better gauge than headcount of Osaic's success, he said, is assets. The total held in client accounts increased
Price also noted that registered representatives tracked by AdvizorPro most likely include some back-office workers with no advisory responsibilities. (AdvizorPro applies a filter to exclude non-advisors from its count of registered reps, but its numbers still most likely count some people who don't work with clients or manage assets.)
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Top Osaic executives also headed for the exits
Punctuating the advisor exits has been a steady stream of departures for prominent Osaic executives. They include:
- Ed Swenson, a former head of Osaic's RIA business division who left in 2025 to become the president and managing partner of the hybrid firm RFG Advisory;
- Greg Cornick, a former president of advice and wealth management who was
sidelined as executive vice president of wealth management solutions before leaving this year; - Chief Financial Officer Kristy Britt, who departed around the same time as Cornick and is now CFO for the business and accounting firm Wipfli;
Dimple Shah , a former strategy chief who left in May to become managing director of wealth at theAI firm Humanity Labs ; and- Kristen Kimmell, a former executive vice president of business development who departed in June to rejoin RBC Wealth Management.
More recently, Kevin Peterson, a onetime senior vice president of business development at Osaic, left to join the RIA consolidator Carson Group; and Eric Hansen, a former senior vice president of marketing, departed for a similar position at the fintech firm Envestnet.
The departed executives either didn't respond to requests for comment or declined to be interviewed.
Osaic has been busy hiring either replacements or leaders for new positions. Most notably,
As to the departed executives, Price said some, like Shah and Kimmell, had job offers that Osaic could hardly have hoped to match.
"I think some of those are regrettable and some are not, right?" Price said. "And there are people we didn't want to leave, and there are people that, look, it was time. And now we are focused on a much different next five years than the last 10."
He also said not all the departures can be linked to Journey to One. Some of the executives who left cashed in on their ownership this spring when
"When you get through these things and there's liquidity offered, some people are going to say, 'You know what, time for me to do something else,'" Price said.
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Price would do it all over again, with a few changes
Looking back at the last few years, Price said he has no regrets about Journey to One. Of course, if he had it to do all over again, there are a few things he would change.
He remembers telling the more than 400 employees working on Journey to One on the first weekend that client accounts were to be moved over to the unified firm's systems and that some things were likely to go wrong in unforeseeable ways.
"Our job is not to worry about the mistakes," he remembers saying. "Our job is to fix them as fast as we know that we have them."
Minor mishaps aside, Price said his biggest regret was not waiting longer to introduce new technology.
"We rolled out our new tech stack about four months too early," he said. "We did not have enough use cases on it. We had tested it in pilot with a couple hundred advisors. But when you start to put 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 — you pick up use cases that you never tested for on the smaller use-case group."
Months after Journey to One had concluded, online commenters were still flocking to sites like Reddit
Phil Waxelbaum, the founder of the recruiting firm Masada Consulting, agreed Price could have saved himself some headaches by moving more slowly and perhaps starting on the Journey to One earlier. Still, he thinks Price largely accomplished what he set out to do and was well prepared for the inevitable fallout.
There's little doubt that Journey to One lingers in many Osaic advisors' minds as an unpleasant experience, perhaps one that still has some looking toward the exits, Waxelbaum said.
"You can get on the phone and call the advisors," Waxelbaum said. "Let me know if you ever get one of them who says, 'Oh boy, thank God we did this. That was great.'"
At its worst, Waxelbaum said, Journey to One prevented Osaic from pursuing other goals that could have been helpful to its growth. The consolidation stymied not only recruiting but also potential dealmaking. While Osaic's rival LPL Financial was out making a series of large acquisitions, Osaic had to set its M&A ambitions to the side.
LPL reshaped the industry last year with its purchase of Commonwealth Financial Network — a rival broker-dealer with $305 billion in assets at the time. Osaic's biggest recent acquisition, meanwhile, came in June 2025
"The question is: Now that they have this thing to what the architecture called for, will he be able to guide this thing to recover and exceed its prior growth rate?" Waxelbaum said.
Jeff Nash, the CEO of the recruiting firm Bridgemark Strategies, said he thinks the turmoil caused by Journey to One is mostly in the rearview mirror. He predicted recruiting would pick up, especially after Osaic replaces some of the departed executives.
"What we're seeing is they're actually already having some momentum and some success," Nash said.
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How Osaic's journey sets it up for a liquidity event
Price said the next stage in Osaic's journey will be determined by the team he has in place, along with the firm's private equity owners. He said the headcount for incoming advisors is up 70% year over year through June, he said.
Price noted that firms like Bain and Ares had plenty of wealth managers they could have taken ownership stakes in.
"They didn't have to invest in Osaic," he said. "And I think we felt really good that two of the top five private equity firms believe in the strategy and put capital in to take out shareholders in the 2019 fund, which is really what they did."
Price said he thinks Osaic's more-or-less unified structure, now that the pain of achieving it is over, will become a distinguishing feature. He noted that one of Osaic's chief rivals, Cetera, still must contend with being made up of various separate broker-dealers and all the complexity that entails.
Price also cited an advantage that may strike many as counterintuitive. Unlike many of its competitors, Osaic has no business unit dedicated to completing and clearing advisors' trades made on behalf of clients. Without a self-clearing division, Osaic is free to work with any number of large outside custody and
That adds to Osaic's appeal to RIAs, many of which also hold client assets at Pershing, Fidelity and other firms. When an RIA team joins Osaic, they most likely don't have to go through the cumbersome "repapering" process required for moving assets from one custodian to another.
"So our next five years, if you will, will lead to some sort of liquidity event," Price said. "At that point in time it could be staying private and doing another continuation vehicle, it could be going public. Our debt comes due in 2032, so this all lined up for a longer-term ownership to let wealth play out. And post Journey to One, we are much more elegantly positioned."
