LPL Was Getting Bigger. Cetera And Raymond James Found Two Places To Recruit Against It.

Wealth Management

Aug 14

Two advisor moves announced in August 2025 looked modest compared with the multibillion-dollar recruiting headlines that increasingly dominate wealth management. Cetera Financial Group recruited Susan Wilkinson and her Charlottesville, Virginia-based Wilkinson Wealth Management team from LPL Financial with approximately $380 million in assets under administration, while Raymond James Financial Services recruited Private Wealth Consultants founders Leo Boisvert and Erik Heben from Commonwealth Financial Network with approximately $210 million in client assets.

The InvestmentNews report connected the moves through timing. Wilkinson had spent more than 17 years affiliated with LPL and most recently operated through Private Advisor Group, one of LPL’s largest OSJs. Boisvert and Heben, meanwhile, were leaving Commonwealth just as LPL had closed its $2.7 billion acquisition of the independent broker-dealer and begun the difficult work of retaining its approximately 3,000 advisors and $305 billion in assets.

With hindsight, the two moves look more connected than they did on announcement day. Wilkinson exited an established LPL ecosystem relationship shortly before LPL deepened that ecosystem by taking a minority ownership stake in Private Advisor Group. Boisvert and Heben exited a newly acquired LPL ecosystem before Commonwealth’s full transition onto LPL’s platform. In one case, a mature LPL-affiliated practice chose another platform after 17 years. In the other, longtime Commonwealth advisors chose not to wait and see what their independent firm would become under new ownership.

That does not make the story “LPL is losing.” LPL has become one of the largest and most aggressive wealth-management platforms in the country precisely because it can recruit, acquire and invest across multiple advisor channels. The more useful conclusion is that scale creates new competitive surfaces. When a firm becomes the broker-dealer behind major OSJs, the owner of acquired advisor networks, the minority investor in RIAs and the strategic partner behind supported-independence businesses, rivals gain more places to make their own case about service, culture and control.

Cetera and Raymond James were selling different alternatives, but the August 2025 roundup captured the same underlying question from two directions: Can a larger platform keep making experienced advisors feel individually supported as its ecosystem becomes more complicated?

TL;DR

Cetera recruited a 12-person LPL-linked team: Susan Wilkinson and Wilkinson Wealth Management moved to Summit Financial Networks with approximately $380 million in assets under administration.
The LPL relationship was unusually long: Wilkinson had been affiliated with LPL for more than 17 years and had most recently operated through Private Advisor Group.
Service drove the public rationale: Wilkinson emphasized white-glove support, Cetera’s Regional Growth Teams and cultural alignment with Summit rather than presenting the move as a simple payout decision.
The practice is planning intensive: Wilkinson Wealth Management emphasizes comprehensive financial planning, estate and business-transition planning, tax coordination, investments, insurance and team-based client service.
Private Advisor Group adds hindsight: Three months after Wilkinson’s move, LPL acquired a minority stake in PAG to deepen an already decades-long relationship around advisor growth, practice management and succession.
Raymond James added $210 million from Commonwealth: Leo Boisvert and Erik Heben brought Private Wealth Consultants to Raymond James Financial Services in Fort Myers, Florida.
The Commonwealth move was culturally significant: Boisvert had spent 18 years there and Heben had been affiliated since 2006, making the decision more than a routine broker-dealer hop.
LPL had just closed Commonwealth: LPL completed the acquisition on Aug. 1, 2025 and said it remained on track for a 90% retention target while planning a platform transition that would run into late 2026.
Raymond James later proved the move was an early signal: By October 2025, InvestmentNews reported that Raymond James had recruited 18 former Commonwealth teams with close to $4.5 billion in assets.
The bigger recruiting lesson is about the middle layer: OSJs, advisor communities and independent channels increasingly determine whether national scale feels useful or distant to an individual practice.

Wilkinson’s Exit Was A Service Vote After 17 Years, Not A Sudden Business-Model Conversion

Wilkinson Wealth Management did not leave LPL because the firm wanted to stop operating as an independent advisory business. It moved from one supported-independence ecosystem into another. That makes the public explanation for the transition more important because the choice was not simply independence versus employment or RIA versus wirehouse. It was a comparison between two large-platform relationships serving the same underlying entrepreneurial practice.

Wilkinson had nearly three decades of industry experience when the move was announced. She founded her Charlottesville firm 17 years earlier and built a planning-centered organization that uses a team approach rather than positioning the practice entirely around one producer. Cetera said clients could receive estate-planning support, tax-planning access and investment advice from a full-time Chartered Financial Analyst as part of the practice’s broader wealth-management process.

That operating model explains why “white-glove service” was not merely a pleasant phrase in the recruiting announcement. A 12-person organization with a proprietary planning process, specialized professionals and a broad client-service promise depends heavily on the infrastructure sitting behind the practice. Home-office responsiveness affects how quickly the local team can open accounts, solve operational problems, obtain approvals, answer complex planning questions and keep the service experience consistent across clients.

The recruiting decision therefore appears to have been less about abandoning LPL’s scale than about deciding which platform made scale feel most useful at the practice level. Wilkinson specifically identified Cetera’s high-touch support and dedicated Regional Growth Teams as reasons for the move, while describing a face-to-face home-office visit with Summit as the turning point in the decision.

A Home-Office Visit Became Part Of Platform Due Diligence

The importance Wilkinson placed on meeting Summit personnel face-to-face is worth examining because advisor recruiting often gets reduced to numbers that can be compared in a spreadsheet. Transition packages, payouts, technology costs, ticket charges and platform fees matter, but many experienced practices are also evaluating something harder to quantify: what happens when the advisor needs an answer from the home office and the client is waiting.

A home-office visit lets a team test the recruiting pitch against actual people. Advisors can meet compliance personnel, transition specialists, operations leaders, technology teams and executives who will become part of the business relationship after the recruiter moves on to the next prospect. For a practice that has already spent 17 years inside one broker-dealer relationship, that cultural diligence may be especially important because the cost of discovering a service mismatch after hundreds of client accounts move can be substantial.

Cetera has increasingly made this “big firm that feels small” idea part of its broader positioning. In describing leadership changes around its advisor communities, the firm has emphasized in-office support, Regional Growth Teams and efforts to understand individual advisor businesses in detail rather than relying exclusively on centralized corporate scale. That is the infrastructure behind the service argument Wilkinson cited publicly.

The harder question comes after recruiting. Personalized attention is relatively easy to promise during courtship because the recruit is strategically important. The value of the model is determined years later, when the practice is one of thousands inside Cetera and needs the same level of responsiveness during ordinary operational problems, compliance reviews and periods of rapid growth. Cetera’s recruiting proposition becomes durable only if the service experience remains differentiated after onboarding.

“Growing By Getting Better” Changes The Meaning Of Advisor Growth

Tom Halloran, then leading Cetera’s Advisor Channel, highlighted Wilkinson’s philosophy of growing “by getting better, not just bigger.” That phrase is particularly useful because it distinguishes two different forms of growth that wealth platforms often blend together in recruiting material.

One is scale growth: more assets, more households, more advisors and more acquisitions. The other is capability growth: deeper planning, more consistent service, better staff utilization, more sophisticated investment support and stronger systems around the clients the practice already serves. A platform can help with both, but the infrastructure required is not identical.

Wilkinson Wealth Management’s current client-facing materials reinforce the second approach. The practice describes financial planning as the cornerstone of its services, combines planning with investment management, insurance strategies and business solutions and emphasizes long-term partnerships built around client goals rather than a narrow asset-management relationship. Susan Wilkinson’s individual profile also identifies experience in retirement and distribution planning, estate and business-transition planning, budgeting and divorce planning.

For a firm built that way, platform quality can affect growth even if the practice never buys another advisory business. Better home-office support can free staff from administrative work. More reliable technology can expand capacity without adding employees at the same rate as clients. Planning resources can help the firm handle more complicated households. Investment support can let lead advisors spend more time on relationships and less time reproducing analysis that specialists can perform more efficiently. Those are growth levers even when the asset count rises gradually rather than through a major acquisition.

The Full-Time Analyst Detail Reveals The Type Of Practice Cetera Won

The presence of a full-time CFA professional is not merely a staffing footnote. It shows that Wilkinson Wealth Management had already moved beyond the model in which one advisor personally handles prospecting, planning, portfolio construction and every client-service question. The practice was operating more like a professionalized advisory business with different people handling different parts of the client experience.

That creates a different platform requirement. A multi-professional practice needs technology that lets staff share information cleanly, workflows that clarify who owns a task and compliance processes that do not force every decision back through the founder. It also needs enough flexibility for specialists to operate inside their own areas while maintaining one coherent client experience.

Cetera therefore did not recruit only $380 million in assets. It recruited a mature operating structure with enough employees to make service quality a firmwide productivity issue. If Summit can improve that organization’s efficiency, the economic value of the move could eventually exceed the initial asset number because the same team may be able to serve more complex clients without proportional increases in operating friction.

This is also why the move can matter to other mid-sized practices. Billion-dollar teams attract headlines, but firms with several hundred million dollars often sit at a critical stage where the founder has already built institutional complexity without yet having the resources of a national RIA. Platform support can become disproportionately valuable at exactly that point.

Private Advisor Group Makes Wilkinson’s Departure More Interesting In Hindsight

The Wilkinson move becomes more strategically revealing when viewed against what happened to Private Advisor Group only a few months later.

In November 2025, LPL acquired a minority ownership stake in PAG, joining Merchant Investment Management as a minority investor while legacy shareholders retained majority ownership. Private Advisor Group said the investment would deepen an almost 30-year relationship with LPL and expand resources around practice management, advisor growth and succession planning. PAG remained independently operated under its existing brand.

The timing does not establish that the later LPL investment caused Wilkinson’s earlier departure. There is no public evidence supporting that conclusion, and Wilkinson’s stated reasons centered on Cetera and Summit’s service culture. The sequence is useful for a different reason: it shows just how structurally important PAG had become inside LPL’s supported-independence ecosystem at roughly the same time one of its substantial affiliated teams decided another community was a better fit.

NJ Financial News’ analysis of the Private Advisor Group stake explains why that middle layer matters. PAG is not merely another outside RIA using LPL for occasional services. It has long-standing broker-dealer and custody ties to LPL, offers its own RIA structure and community and can influence succession, growth and platform choices for advisors inside the network.

LPL Later Bought Deeper Into The Exact Type Of Relationship Wilkinson Left

LPL’s minority investment confirmed that the company sees OSJ and RIA partners as strategically valuable rather than incidental layers between the broker-dealer and individual advisors. LPL and PAG said the new ownership alignment would support advisor businesses throughout their life cycles, with particular emphasis on growth and succession.

That strategy became even clearer in 2026. When LPL announced its planned acquisition of Mariner Advisor Network, 144 hybrid advisors were slated to move into Private Advisor Group’s hybrid RIA structure while maintaining multicustody relationships and continuing to use LPL’s platform. LPL described PAG as a minority equity partner and its primary broker-dealer and custodian.

The irony is useful rather than damaging. LPL’s response to the growing importance of supported-independence networks has been to deepen its relationship with exactly those networks. Cetera’s response has been to use communities such as Summit to argue that advisors can receive large-platform resources through a smaller-feeling service layer.

Both strategies acknowledge the same reality: direct broker-dealer scale is no longer enough.

The organization sitting between the national platform and the local advisor can determine how that scale is experienced.

Summit Financial Networks Is Cetera’s Answer To The “Big Firm, Small Experience” Problem

Wilkinson did not simply join Cetera at the corporate level. Her practice affiliated through Summit Financial Networks, one of Cetera’s advisor communities. That choice matters because Cetera’s multi-community architecture is one of the ways the company tries to prevent national size from feeling generic to individual advisors.

The broad Cetera organization had approximately 12,000 advisors and institutions and about $590 billion in assets under administration as of June 30, 2025. At that scale, it would be difficult for every independent practice to maintain a direct personal relationship with the small number of executives running the entire enterprise. Communities such as Summit effectively insert another service and cultural layer into the organization.

That can create a recruiting advantage when an advisor wants national resources but does not want to feel like one practice inside an enormous homogeneous broker-dealer. Summit can sell accessibility and community while Cetera supplies technology, products, compliance resources and enterprise-level infrastructure behind it.

The structure also creates execution risk. Every additional organizational layer can either make support more personal or create another handoff. The test is whether the advisor knows exactly where to go when a problem falls between local practice operations, Summit support and Cetera’s enterprise functions.

Cetera Has Repeated The Summit Pitch With Other LPL Teams

Wilkinson’s move was not the last time Cetera used Summit to attract an established LPL-affiliated practice. Later coverage of Guided Financial Strategies showed another planning-centered firm leaving LPL after more than two decades and choosing Summit around themes of transparency, advisor-first culture, operational support, technology and responsible growth.

The repetition matters more than the individual asset totals. Once a platform can point to multiple advisors who made similar transitions for similar reasons, recruiting becomes self-reinforcing. A prospective team can speak with peers who have already gone through the conversion and ask what actually happened after the sales process ended.

That kind of peer validation is difficult for national firms to manufacture through marketing. Advisors know every broker-dealer describes itself as supportive, flexible and technologically advanced. A long-tenured former LPL advisor who can explain exactly why the new service model works carries more credibility with another LPL prospect than a generic presentation deck.

Cetera’s strategic challenge is therefore to turn Wilkinson and similar recruits into long-term references rather than short-term announcements. The value compounds if the advisors stay, grow and tell other teams that the service promise survived the transition.

Raymond James Was Solving A Completely Different Problem For Private Wealth Consultants

The Raymond James side of the InvestmentNews roundup started from a different place.

Leo Boisvert and Erik Heben were already independent advisors. They were not leaving a wirehouse or employee channel in search of business ownership. Their Private Wealth Consultants practice had spent years affiliated with Commonwealth Financial Network, where the duo managed approximately $210 million before moving to Raymond James Financial Services, the independent advisor channel of Raymond James.

Boisvert had spent 18 years at Commonwealth and had a 32-year industry career. Heben brought more than 30 years of experience and had been affiliated with Commonwealth since 2006. Their decision therefore resembled Wilkinson’s in one important respect: this was not a practice rapidly shopping broker-dealers. Both teams were leaving relationships that had lasted for a substantial portion of their professional lives.

The difference was the catalyst. Wilkinson publicly described a deliberate search for a service culture that better matched her firm. Boisvert’s move landed immediately after LPL closed its acquisition of Commonwealth, creating a natural decision point for an advisor who had previously chosen Commonwealth as an independent platform.

Boisvert described Raymond James as a return to the values of independence, integrity and client emphasis that had attracted him to the profession. He also characterized the move as the place where he wanted to build the final chapter of his career. Those comments make the decision as much a career-design question as a platform-selection question.

Commonwealth’s Sale Turned Staying Into An Active Decision

Long advisor affiliations benefit from inertia.

An advisor who knows the people, systems, policies and culture of a broker-dealer may tolerate imperfections because changing platforms creates paperwork, client conversations, staff retraining and operational risk. Familiarity itself has economic value.

An acquisition disrupts that inertia because the future platform is changing whether or not the advisor acts.

LPL completed its acquisition of Commonwealth on Aug. 1, 2025, just days before the InvestmentNews roundup. The deal gave LPL ownership of a firm supporting approximately 3,000 advisors and $305 billion in assets. LPL said it remained on track for its 90% retention target, while Commonwealth would remain a wholly owned portfolio company during a transition to LPL’s platform expected to continue into the fourth quarter of 2026.

That meant Commonwealth advisors faced a rare strategic choice. They could stay and allow LPL to prove that it would preserve the aspects of Commonwealth they valued, or they could use the acquisition window to select another independent platform before a later system conversion forced additional operational changes.

Raymond James Could Offer Change Without Asking Advisors To Give Up Independence

This is where Raymond James Financial Services had a particularly credible pitch.

Private Wealth Consultants remained a locally branded independent practice. Raymond James’ own disclosure states that Private Wealth Consultants is independent of Raymond James Financial Services, while securities are offered through RJFS and advisory services through Raymond James Financial Services Advisors.

That structure meant Boisvert and Heben could change the national firm beneath the practice without moving into a traditional employee brokerage model. For advisors who had spent years valuing Commonwealth’s independent culture, that continuity could make Raymond James easier to evaluate than a destination that required a more fundamental change in business identity.

Raymond James also brought substantial platform scale. At the time of the announcement, the company reported approximately $1.64 trillion in total client assets. Its broader wealth infrastructure includes investment capabilities, banking and lending, trust services, retirement planning and private-wealth resources that independent practices can access without giving up local ownership.

The recruiting argument therefore was not “leave independence for scale.”

It was “keep independence and change who provides the scale.”

The $210 Million Move Became An Early Warning Of A Much Larger Commonwealth Exodus

The August 2025 Private Wealth Consultants move looked like one advisor departure during the first days of LPL ownership.

By October, it looked like an early signal.

InvestmentNews reported on Oct. 3, 2025 that Raymond James had recruited 18 former Commonwealth teams with close to $4.5 billion in client assets. Four teams representing approximately $1.08 billion had been announced during that week alone.

NJ Financial News’ later analysis of the $4.5 billion recruiting run showed why the trend mattered. Raymond James had become more than one destination among many. It was turning uncertainty created by LPL’s acquisition into a concentrated recruiting campaign aimed at advisors who already understood independent ownership but were questioning the future of their platform.

The trend continued beyond 2025. Later reporting showed additional Commonwealth teams moving to Raymond James, including much larger practices, while LPL continued to argue that the economically important retention measure was assets rather than raw headcount. The persistence of the departures demonstrates why acquisition-day advisor totals are never guaranteed future assets.

Headcount And Asset Retention Can Tell Different Stories

By January 2026, an AdvizorPro and Muriel Consulting analysis cited by InvestmentNews tracked 653 advisor departures from Commonwealth between April 1 and Dec. 31, 2025, equivalent to roughly 22.5% of the advisor population that existed around the transaction. That did not automatically mean LPL had missed its economic retention target because the company’s disclosures and later reporting increasingly framed the 90% goal around assets rather than advisor headcount.

The difference is important.

Ten small practices can leave while one large billion-dollar team stays, producing poor headcount retention but relatively strong asset retention. The reverse can also happen: a firm can keep most advisors numerically while losing a small number of large teams carrying substantial revenue and assets.

That is why the $210 million Private Wealth Consultants move should not be interpreted as evidence that LPL’s Commonwealth acquisition was failing. It should be interpreted as evidence that the acquisition created a real recruiting market. Competitors did not have to win every advisor to impose a retention cost on LPL.

LPL had to spend time, transition resources, capital and management attention convincing Commonwealth advisors that the firm they would have after conversion was worth staying for. Raymond James only needed enough credible wins to show undecided advisors that leaving was realistic.

LPL’s Scale Created Two Different Recruiting Attack Surfaces

Wilkinson Wealth Management and Private Wealth Consultants expose two distinct pressure points around the same expanding company.

The first is ecosystem retention. Wilkinson was already inside an LPL-connected structure through Private Advisor Group. The question was whether LPL’s broad capabilities, combined with the OSJ layer around the practice, created a better day-to-day fit than Cetera and Summit.

The second is acquisition retention. Boisvert and Heben were not longtime LPL advisors when they chose Raymond James. They were longtime Commonwealth advisors who were about to become part of LPL because their broker-dealer had been purchased.

Those situations require different defensive strategies.

Existing Affiliates Need A Reason To Keep Choosing The Platform

A mature LPL-affiliated practice can theoretically evaluate alternatives at any time.

LPL has to make the relationship continuously valuable through technology, service, investment access, economics, succession, custody and practice support. The absence of an acquisition event does not eliminate the risk of departure.

Wilkinson’s 17-year tenure makes the point particularly clearly. Long relationships can create loyalty, but they can also give the advisor enough experience to know precisely which parts of the platform no longer fit the next stage of the business.

Acquired Advisors Need A Reason To Accept A Platform They Did Not Select

Commonwealth created a different challenge because LPL was asking thousands of advisors to remain after a decision made at the corporate ownership level.

Some advisors may have been excited about LPL’s scale and economics. Others may have valued Commonwealth precisely because it was not LPL. The acquisition forced those preferences into the open.

That is why LPL’s acquisition strategy and ordinary recruiting strategy cannot be separated completely.

Every major transaction adds advisors.

It also creates a temporary market in which those advisors can be recruited away.

Service Is Becoming A Growth Variable Rather Than A Soft Cultural Metric

One of the most useful commonalities between the two moves is that neither winner relied solely on size.

Cetera sold Wilkinson on service culture and access.

Raymond James sold Boisvert and Heben on independence, integrity and client focus.

Those words can sound intangible compared with asset totals or transition packages, but they increasingly describe measurable operating economics.

A practice with slow home-office support may need more local staff to chase operational problems. An advisor who spends several hours each week solving technology or account-service issues has less capacity for prospecting and planning. A branch that repeatedly waits for approvals can frustrate clients and employees. Poor service can therefore reduce margins and growth even when the cost never appears as a separate line item labeled “broker-dealer service failure.”

“White Glove” Has To Show Up In Workflows

For Wilkinson Wealth Management, the useful test is not whether Summit employees are friendly.

It is whether the structure improves daily execution.

Does the practice receive faster answers? Can its staff reach the right person without repeated escalation? Does the technology reduce duplicate work? Can the firm’s investment analyst access the data and systems needed to support advisors efficiently? Can estate, tax and business-planning conversations be coordinated without the home office creating friction?

Those operational questions determine whether Cetera’s service culture translates into economic value.

“Independence” Has To Survive Scale

For Private Wealth Consultants, Raymond James faces a different version of the same test.

Boisvert explicitly framed the move around independence and client emphasis. Raymond James Financial Services therefore has to provide the resources of a $1 trillion-plus financial organization without making the local practice feel controlled by a corporate structure that undermines the independence it was supposed to preserve.

That balance is one of the central challenges in modern independent broker-dealer competition. Advisors want sophisticated technology, compliance, banking, planning and investment infrastructure, but many also want to determine how the local practice communicates, staffs, prices, plans succession and builds relationships.

The winning platform is not necessarily the smallest or largest.

It is the one whose scale interferes least with the advisor’s client proposition while contributing the most useful infrastructure behind it.

The Middle Layer Is Becoming One Of Wealth Management’s Most Valuable Assets

The August 2025 moves also highlight a structural part of wealth management that often disappears from recruiting headlines: the organizations sitting between the advisor and the national broker-dealer.

Private Advisor Group was that layer for Wilkinson.

Summit Financial Networks became that layer at Cetera.

Raymond James Financial Services itself functions as a distinct independent channel within the larger Raymond James organization.

These structures influence culture, service and advisor loyalty because they translate enterprise resources into the daily experience of individual practices.

OSJs Are No Longer Just Supervisory Outposts

The traditional OSJ role centered heavily on supervision and branch oversight.

Large modern OSJs and hybrid RIAs can do much more. They may provide compliance, technology, marketing, custody choices, investment management, succession resources, practice consulting, community and access to capital. Private Advisor Group’s current platform explicitly markets capabilities in those areas, while remaining a separate RIA from LPL despite LPL’s broker-dealer relationship and minority ownership stake.

That makes the middle layer valuable enough for national platforms to invest in directly.

LPL’s PAG stake is evidence.

Instead of treating PAG as a replaceable branch between the broker-dealer and advisor, LPL bought a financial interest in the organization and later partnered with it on the Mariner Advisor Network transaction.

The strategic lesson is important: advisor loyalty may attach partly to the broker-dealer, partly to the RIA, partly to the OSJ and partly to the local practice.

Firms that understand where that loyalty actually lives can recruit more intelligently.

Client Impact Was Very Different In Charlottesville And Fort Myers

The two practices also had different client-transition stories.

Wilkinson clients were moving from an LPL/PAG structure to a Cetera/Summit relationship. Private Wealth Consultants clients were moving from Commonwealth to Raymond James Financial Services while remaining with an independently branded local practice.

The advisor may view both as platform changes.

The client experiences them through paperwork, portals, statements, fees, service and the explanation received from the advisory team.

Wilkinson Clients Needed To Understand The New Support Structure

Wilkinson Wealth Management markets itself around personalized financial planning and long-term partnership rather than around a broker-dealer brand. Its current website continues presenting the local firm as the primary client relationship, while disclosures identify the relevant Cetera affiliation beneath it.

That can help continuity because clients still see the same local practice.

The transition conversation should nonetheless answer practical questions about account custody, digital access, investment availability, advisory agreements, fees and how Cetera or Summit will affect service. If the advisor told clients the move was designed to improve the experience, clients should eventually be able to identify what became better.

Private Wealth Consultants Clients Were Choosing Whether To Move Before A Later LPL Conversion

Commonwealth clients faced a more unusual timeline because LPL had already bought their existing platform.

A Private Wealth Consultants client could effectively face two paths. Following Boisvert and Heben meant moving to Raymond James voluntarily in 2025. Remaining with Commonwealth meant staying through Commonwealth’s period as an LPL-owned company and potentially participating in the broader transition onto LPL’s platform later.

That creates an important client-service argument for early-moving advisors. The advisor can say that the practice evaluated the industry and selected its preferred destination rather than waiting for a corporate integration designed by someone else.

The counterargument can also be valid. A client comfortable with Commonwealth might reasonably prefer to stay and see whether LPL delivers a smooth transition rather than move immediately.

The client’s decision should therefore depend on the relationship and practical consequences, not on the assumption that one corporate structure is universally superior.

Clients Should Ask About Legal Entities, Not Just Practice Names

Independent advisor branding can make the relationship feel simple at the client level.

The regulatory structure beneath it can be more complicated.

Raymond James’ announcement explicitly states that Private Wealth Consultants is independent of Raymond James Financial Services, that securities are offered through RJFS and that investment advisory services are offered through Raymond James Financial Services Advisors.

Private Advisor Group likewise distinguishes between securities offered through LPL and investment advice offered through PAG, a separate registered investment adviser. Its current disclosures also acknowledge multiple custodial relationships.

Wilkinson’s move changed that underlying entity map.

Clients do not need to memorize the corporate structure, but they should understand enough to identify who is providing brokerage services, who provides investment advice, where assets are custodied and which entity is responsible for disclosures and supervision.

Local Independence Does Not Mean Regulatory Independence

The local firm may control its brand, employees and planning process.

Brokerage activity still sits inside a regulated broker-dealer framework. Advisory activity sits inside an RIA framework. Custody may be handled by another institution entirely.

That separation is normal in modern independent wealth management.

Clear communication becomes especially important during a platform change because clients may continue seeing the same advisor and same practice name while several regulated relationships beneath the surface change.

Compliance quality therefore contributes directly to client trust.

A smooth transition is not only one that avoids paperwork problems. It is one in which the client understands the new structure well enough to make an informed decision about continuing the relationship.

The Team Around The Advisor Is Often What Makes High-Touch Service Possible

Wilkinson’s 12-person organization also gives the Cetera move a staffing dimension that recruiting coverage can understate.

Clients may identify Susan Wilkinson as the founder and lead advisor, but the service promise is delivered by a larger organization. Wilkinson’s current website shows a team supporting planning, investments, operations and client relationships, while the Cetera announcement emphasized the practice’s team-based process.

The same principle applies to Private Wealth Consultants. Boisvert and Heben moved with Client Services Manager Paula Heben and Client Service Associate Dawn Mannina-Sanford. Raymond James’ announcement presented the group as a four-person practice rather than two advisors operating without support.

That matters because most clients experience the platform partly through non-advisor employees.

A lead advisor can promise exceptional service, but administrative staff members are often the people resolving distributions, account paperwork, beneficiary changes, digital-access problems, transfers and scheduling. If the new broker-dealer makes those employees more efficient, the client may experience a genuine improvement even when the investment strategy stays unchanged.

If the platform makes their jobs harder, the move can damage the exact high-touch culture used to justify it.

Cetera’s LPL Recruiting Story Became More Repeatable After Wilkinson

One recruiting win can be dismissed as individual preference.

A pattern creates a platform narrative.

Cetera continued adding advisors from LPL after Wilkinson, including other longtime teams that cited service, personalized attention, transition support and advisor-first culture. Its October 2025 announcement involving Frank Mezzanotte, for example, described a former LPL advisor who said peer feedback from other LPL alumni influenced his decision and who praised Cetera’s onboarding and personalized approach.

That is how recruiting networks form.

An advisor leaves one platform and becomes a reference for another advisor. Several departures create an alumni group. Recruiters gain examples tailored to a particular objection. The next LPL advisor evaluating Cetera no longer has to rely exclusively on Cetera’s description of itself because the advisor can ask former LPL peers whether the experience matches the pitch.

Wilkinson’s move therefore has value beyond $380 million if it contributes to a repeatable recruiting lane.

The same logic applies to Cetera’s later Summit recruiting wins, where service and community repeatedly appear as reasons established teams reconsider national platforms.

Raymond James Turned Commonwealth Into A Recruiting Franchise

Raymond James achieved something similar with Commonwealth, but on a much larger scale.

The Private Wealth Consultants announcement was published four days after LPL closed the acquisition. Within two months, Raymond James had recruited 18 teams representing close to $4.5 billion in assets.

That momentum gave Raymond James a recruiting story that was easy for other Commonwealth advisors to understand. The firm could point to advisors who had already moved, retained local independent identities and selected RJFS as their new national infrastructure provider.

NJ Financial News later described the Commonwealth recruiting run as a live advisor-confidence referendum on the LPL transaction. That framing remains useful because the departures gave outside observers a visible measure of how at least some Commonwealth advisors reacted to the acquisition.

The recruitment did not mean LPL received no value from Commonwealth.

LPL bought an unusually respected advisor network, and retaining the largest asset-producing practices can still make the transaction economically successful even with visible headcount departures. The more precise takeaway is that Raymond James demonstrated a large acquisition creates value for competitors too.

LPL bought the platform.

Raymond James gained access to a motivated prospect pool.

The 2026 Hindsight Makes The Original $590 Million Roundup More Important

At announcement, the combined asset figure across Wilkinson Wealth Management and Private Wealth Consultants was approximately $590 million.

That now looks less important than what followed.

LPL deepened its ownership relationship with Private Advisor Group in November 2025 and later used PAG as a strategic partner in the planned Mariner Advisor Network transaction. That suggests LPL concluded the OSJ/RIA layer Wilkinson had left was important enough to deserve direct capital investment and a larger role in its supported-independence strategy.

Raymond James, meanwhile, continued building momentum among Commonwealth advisors. The initial Boisvert-Heben move became part of a flow eventually measured in billions of dollars, while later industry analyses continued tracking meaningful Commonwealth attrition after LPL’s acquisition.

Those developments make the original roundup a useful early snapshot of two separate consequences of LPL’s expansion strategy.

As LPL grows deeper into advisor ecosystems, it gains more control, economics and strategic reach.

It also creates more relationships that competitors can challenge.

The Bigger Industry Shift Is From Broker-Dealer Choice To Ecosystem Choice

The old advisor recruiting decision could often be framed as a comparison between broker-dealers.

That is becoming less accurate.

Wilkinson was evaluating LPL, Private Advisor Group, Cetera and Summit as overlapping layers of an operating ecosystem. Boisvert and Heben were evaluating Commonwealth under new LPL ownership against Raymond James Financial Services while keeping the local Private Wealth Consultants business intact.

A modern advisor may therefore be choosing several things simultaneously:

Broker-dealer infrastructure: Who handles securities, supervision and much of the operational backbone
RIA structure: Which entity provides advisory services and how much flexibility the practice has
OSJ or community: Who provides the most immediate service, culture, compliance and practice support
Custody: Where client assets sit and which technology relationships follow
Capital partner: Who can help finance acquisitions, succession or liquidity
Technology environment: Which tools the staff will actually use every day
Growth model: Whether the practice wants organic growth, recruiting, acquisitions or some combination
Succession path: How founders and younger advisors eventually transfer ownership and client relationships

That is why advisor moves are becoming harder to interpret through a simple “Firm A beat Firm B” framework.

The winning relationship may depend on which layer matters most to the individual practice.

What Large Platforms Should Learn From Both Moves

The common lesson for LPL, Cetera, Raymond James and other national wealth firms is not that scale is a disadvantage.

Scale is increasingly necessary to fund the technology, compliance, cybersecurity, investment research, alternatives infrastructure, custody relationships, practice financing and succession programs sophisticated advisors expect.

The challenge is turning enterprise size into local usefulness.

A platform can support tens of thousands of advisors and still lose a $380 million practice because the advisor believes another organization will respond faster. A firm can acquire $305 billion of assets and still watch longtime advisors leave because those advisors want to select their own future platform.

The Retention Questions Are Operational

Large platforms should ask:

Does the advisor know who owns the relationship when something goes wrong?
Can the practice reach empowered people rather than generic service queues?
Does technology actually eliminate work or merely move it between systems?
Can a community or OSJ preserve local identity without becoming another bureaucracy?
Are growth resources relevant to the practice’s actual strategy?
Can the platform support multigenerational succession without forcing a sale?
Does the acquisition roadmap respect what advisors valued about the acquired firm?
Can clients understand the transition without feeling that corporate strategy is being imposed on them?

Those issues may look softer than recruiting economics.

They determine whether the economics stay on the platform.

Bottom Line: LPL’s Growth Created Opportunity For Rivals At Both Ends Of The Relationship

The August 2025 InvestmentNews roundup looked like a routine week of advisor movement.

Cetera added Susan Wilkinson and her 12-person Wilkinson Wealth Management team from an LPL/Private Advisor Group relationship with approximately $380 million in assets under administration. Raymond James added Leo Boisvert and Erik Heben from Commonwealth with approximately $210 million in client assets.

The deeper story was already forming.

Wilkinson had spent more than 17 years with LPL and was not looking for a completely different business model. Her team wanted a platform relationship that it believed better matched its own high-touch culture, planning process and ambitions for improving the practice. Cetera won by pairing its national infrastructure with Summit Financial Networks and a service proposition built around Regional Growth Teams, accessibility and cultural fit.

Private Wealth Consultants represented a different challenge for LPL. Boisvert and Heben were longtime Commonwealth advisors whose broker-dealer had just been acquired. They could stay and trust LPL to preserve what they valued or make a proactive platform choice before the broader Commonwealth conversion. They chose Raymond James Financial Services, where they could maintain an independent local practice while changing the national infrastructure beneath it.

Later developments made both moves more revealing.

LPL took a minority stake in Private Advisor Group only months after Wilkinson left, deepening its strategic relationship with the OSJ and RIA layer that had supported her practice. The investment targeted growth, practice management and succession, and PAG later became central to LPL’s Mariner Advisor Network strategy.

Raymond James turned its early Commonwealth recruits into a much larger campaign. By October 2025, it had recruited 18 former Commonwealth teams with close to $4.5 billion in assets, proving that LPL’s acquisition had created a substantial market for advisors considering alternatives.

None of this means LPL’s strategy is fundamentally flawed. The company’s willingness to acquire Commonwealth, invest in PAG and participate more directly in advisor succession reflects an understanding that future wealth-management competition is about entire advisor ecosystems rather than one broker-dealer affiliation.

But ecosystem growth has a cost.

The larger the network becomes, the more places an advisor can decide the relationship no longer fits.

Cetera found that opening through service.

Raymond James found it through acquisition uncertainty.

LPL’s challenge is making sure its expanding scale closes more of those openings than it creates.

Frequently Asked Questions About Cetera And Raymond James’ Advisor Moves

Why Did Susan Wilkinson Leave LPL For Cetera?
Susan Wilkinson said she was looking for white-glove support that could help her team serve clients while continuing to grow, and she specifically highlighted Cetera’s Regional Growth Teams and the culture she experienced through Summit Financial Networks. Wilkinson had been affiliated with LPL for more than 17 years and had most recently operated through Private Advisor Group, so the move was not a sudden shift from one business model to a completely different one. The public explanation instead points to platform fit, service and culture as the differentiators, with Wilkinson saying a face-to-face home-office visit helped confirm that Cetera and Summit aligned with the standards her practice wanted to provide clients.
How Much Did Wilkinson Wealth Management Have In Assets?
Cetera and InvestmentNews reported that Wilkinson Wealth Management had approximately $380 million in assets under administration when the Charlottesville, Virginia-based practice moved from LPL’s Private Advisor Group relationship to Summit Financial Networks. The asset figure is only part of the recruiting value because Wilkinson had built a 12-person planning-centered organization with a proprietary client-service process, access to estate and tax-planning resources and a full-time CFA professional supporting investment advice. That organizational depth made the move a useful test of whether Cetera and Summit could deliver the high-touch operating support a mature advisory business needs after leaving a 17-year platform relationship.
Why Did Leo Boisvert And Erik Heben Leave Commonwealth For Raymond James?
Leo Boisvert and Erik Heben moved Private Wealth Consultants to Raymond James Financial Services shortly after LPL completed its acquisition of Commonwealth Financial Network. Boisvert said the transition was about returning to values of independence, integrity and client emphasis and described Raymond James as the place where he wanted to build the final chapter of his career. Because the advisors had spent many years at Commonwealth, the acquisition created a natural point for them to reconsider the platform rather than simply accepting the future structure chosen through the corporate transaction, and RJFS allowed them to retain an independently branded local practice while accessing Raymond James’ national infrastructure.
Did These Advisor Moves Mean LPL’s Commonwealth Acquisition Was Failing?
No. Two advisor departures, or even a larger number of departures, do not by themselves establish that the Commonwealth acquisition failed because LPL’s economic outcome depends heavily on how many client assets and high-producing practices it ultimately retains. LPL said at closing that it remained on track for a 90% retention target, while later reporting showed that advisor headcount attrition and asset retention could produce different pictures of the transaction. What the Raymond James recruiting activity did prove is that the acquisition created a significant competitive opening, with InvestmentNews reporting by October 2025 that Raymond James had recruited 18 former Commonwealth teams representing close to $4.5 billion in assets.
What Should Clients Ask When Their Advisor Changes Broker-Dealers?
Clients should ask what changes operationally rather than assuming that following a familiar advisor automatically preserves every part of the existing relationship. Important questions include whether the same advisory and support team will remain, where assets will be custodied, whether account numbers or online portals change, whether new advisory agreements are required, whether fees or investment options change and which legal entities now provide brokerage and investment-advisory services. Clients should also ask what concrete improvement motivated the move, because a transition justified by better technology, service or planning resources should eventually create a client benefit that can be explained more specifically than saying the new platform is simply “better.”