Barnaby Grist is leaving Schwab and Jon Beatty is stepping up

Barnaby Grist is leaving Schwab Advisor Services for a new position with Cetera Financial Group, a collection of three independent brokerages recently acquired by New York-based Lightyear Capital LLC., according to a report by InvestmentNews. He will move to Los Angeles to become the executive vice president of wealth management where he will recruit advisors, according to the report.

Cetera is the name assigned to the three independent broker-dealer firms — Financial Network Investment Corp., Multi-Financial Securities Corp. and Primevest Financial Services Inc. — formerly part of ING Advisors Group.

Financial Network serves both independent advisors and financial institutions. Multi-Financial of El Segundo, Calif., serves independents exclusively from Denver, Colo., and PrimeVest of St. Cloud, Minn., is dedicated to financial institutions.

The combined IBDs serve 4,800 advisors and over 800 financial institutions throughout the United States. Cetera has approximately $75 billion of assets under administration as of December 31, 2009, according to the Lightyear website. Lightyear is a private equity investment firm that has invested $3 billion. Its Lightyear Fund II reached a deal to purchase the ING IBDs on Nov. 3 and closed the deal on Monday.

In losing Barnaby Grist to Cetera, Schwab Advisor Services is losing a jack-of-all-strategic-trades.

The senior managing director of strategic business development at Schwab was known in the media for his knowledge of breakaways and RIAs with $1 billion or more of assets under management. Of late, his job was to develop strategy for courting assets from advisors who don’t fit the usual mold.

Data sharing

For example, his duties included managing relationships with broker-dealers on behalf of hybrid advisors. Grist also oversaw sales to trust banks and managed complex relationships with turnkey asset management programs. The latter deals involved data sharing, contact details and the winning of TAMP assets to the Schwab platform.

Grist helped to oversee the development of programs for bringing advisors to Schwab from wirehouses by helping them set up their own shops. The advisors turning independent [ATI] portion of the business had been integrated with the client experience portion of the business and is no longer connected to sales.

Grist was also the boss of David Devoe, who heads the mergers and acquisitions platform, Schwab Transitions, for Schwab Advisor Services. The program has had more than 1,000 clients participate during its six years in existence.

Many of Grist’s duties will be brought under Jon Beatty, who has 100 people reporting to him just as head of relationship management. Beatty is now head of sales and the business development staff will report to him, too.

500 RIAs

When I interviewed Beatty last spring he talked about how Schwab has about doubled the assets it manages for RIAs with fewer than $50 million. The firm also attracted 500 new small RIAs in 2008. “It’s all about scale and we have the benefit of being the biggest provider” to RIAs, Beatty said in the earlier interview.

To attract more of these small RIA clients, Schwab hired 50% more service agents and relationship managers who are dedicated to the group, Beatty said. The relationship managers help familiarize existing small RIAs with Schwab’s products and services and recruit new RIAs, he explains. “We believe we are now the best service provider to the small advisor,” he said in the earlier interview.