How Osaic is Leveraging Technology to Recruit, Retain, and Empower Advisors

The situation: a new demand signal, plus a lot of moving parts

Inside Osaic, the conversation wasn’t theoretical. The firm was already navigating an evolving landscape shaped by consolidation and integration—part of a broader acquisition context that brought both opportunity and complexity. The firm was working through its broader initiative to consolidate multiple broker-dealers into one firm under the Osaic brand – known as “Journey to One” – an initiative that ultimately provided its advisors with a consistent experience across Osaic’s digital systems, regulatory and compliance policies, resources, and programs.

That mattered because fees for financial planning services touch everything at once:

• Advisors need a clear way to explain and deliver a planning engagement.
• Operations needs a process that doesn’t create a flood of exceptions and one-off fixes.
• Compliance needs supervision that holds up under scrutiny.
• Executives need to see a model that improves recruiting and retention, not just a new billing option.

And fees for financial planning services had a specific friction point Osaic couldn’t ignore: manual payments. Paper checks and payment chasing weren’t just annoying—they were adoption killers. If planning fees felt like extra admin on top of an already full day, advisors would default back to the familiar.

The pattern was easy to predict. The firms that treated fee-for-service like a side hustle would get side-hustle results. Osaic wanted something else.

The decision: invest heavily, then make it feel simple

Osaic’s response started with a premise: if financial planning was going to be a true front-door service, it needed a real platform behind it with technology, training, and governance that could handle scale.

They invested heavily in technology and enablement and chose to continue and expand their relationship with AdvicePay as part of the answer. The point wasn’t to add another tool. It was to build a workflow that advisors would actually use—and that the home office could actually supervise.

That decision fit into a broader mindset: if Osaic wanted financial planning to be a core offering, they needed to provide modern ways to serve modern clients. That meant giving advisors a way to charge for planning that wasn’t awkward, inconsistent, or dependent on paper.

The build: PlanningHub as the “center of gravity”

Before a broad rollout came structure.

Osaic launched a centralized PlanningHub—a place where advisors could go to learn what good planning looks like at Osaic, how to position it, and how to deliver it consistently. PlanningHub wasn’t a marketing site. It was part education, part reinforcement, and part confidence-builder.

Because the hard part of charging for advice often isn’t the fee. It’s the moment an advisor has to say, “Here’s what this includes, here’s what it costs, and here’s how we’ll work together.”

That takes repetition, examples, and support—especially for advisors who are new to charging fees for their advice, but don’t want to invent a pricing philosophy from scratch.

PlanningHub gave the program a shared language. It also gave the firm something critical: a scalable way to support a strategic initiative for all advisors while focusing human capital on the complexities of the high-net-worth client.

The standardization move: rewrite, consolidate, and launch expanded offerings

While PlanningHub was being built, Osaic tackled the part that makes compliance and operations teams nervous: inconsistency.

They consolidated and rewrote planning agreements, policies, and procedures. Then they launched a standardized set of financial planning offerings through AdvicePay, including ongoing consulting, business succession planning, seminars, corporate executive contracts, and more.

Standardization didn’t mean making planning robotic. It meant advisors could start with something proven, and the firm could supervise against a consistent foundation. It also reduced the “choose your own adventure” problem where every advisor writes their own agreement, explains services differently, and bills in a different way.

For Osaic, this was the bridge between a good idea and a scalable program.

The rollout: start with the planners who would stress-test it

Osaic didn’t try to flip a switch across the entire advisor base.

Early adopters: prolific planners first
Osaic started with its most prolific financial planners. These were the advisors most likely to use the tool immediately, find what broke, and tell Osaic what needed tightening.

A waved approach to reach full scale 
From there, Osaic took a waved approach, rolling out to groups large enough to prove whether the model worked beyond the earliest champions.

After the waved rollout, broader availability was targeted to follow once the program has earned the right to scale.

That “earned” part mattered. Osaic wasn’t just rolling out a tool. They were rolling out a new business motion—and they wanted it to stick.

Early feedback: speed changes behavior

When charging fees for advice becomes easier, it stops being optional.

That was the point behind the advisor quote Osaic heard early:

“I just added 10 or 11 more [clients] in about an hour and a half. It would have taken forever to do that [at my prior firm].”

It’s a simple statement, but it captures the reality: time. Not “productivity” in the abstract—real time that advisors can redirect toward client conversations, planning delivery, and new relationships.

And for Osaic, speed had a second-order effect: it made fees for advice feel like part of the firm’s normal operating rhythm, not an exception that required extra effort.

Governance and guardrails: the part that made it scalable

LAs Osaic moved from early adopters to broader rollout, supervision and consistency became part of the story—not a footnote.

The firm’s earlier work to consolidate agreements and define offerings set the baseline. From there, the program was designed so oversight didn’t require spreadsheets or constant home office intervention.

In practice, this meant the program could scale while still staying supervised:

• Agreements and services stayed standardized, so documentation didn’t drift.
• Billing rules stayed clear, so exceptions didn’t become the norm.
• Visibility stayed centralized, so leadership could monitor adoption and activity without hunting for data.
• Ongoing relationships stayed client-friendly, including a clear process for stopping subscriptions.

What’s next: growth, measured in advisors and outcomes

Osaic’s long-term aim isn’t just to support fees for financial planning services in pockets of the business. It’s to make it a recruiting and retention advantage, especially with younger advisors who want to serve their peers and build durable relationships early. Osaic has a clear and direct target for the number of its advisors who offer financial planning for a fee.

The roadmap ahead is straightforward in concept—expand access, continue enablement through the PlanningHub, and keep tightening the program based on real usage. The harder part is doing it at scale without losing consistency.

So far, Osaic’s experience suggests a clear lesson: fees for advice doesn’t scale because you announce it. It scales when you make it easier than the old way—and you support it with training, structure, and supervision.