Financial advisers are fighting to keep clients and draw new ones in a market that is yet to fully recover from the crash of 2008 and early 2009.
Some advisers are in the hot seat as disgruntled clients question retirement strategies and new investors grasp for economic security.
Other financial advisers have lost business as former clients seek new approaches to managing their money.
The unsettled market has opened the door for brokerages and financial advisory firms with branches here to go after market share and deploy different tactics to draw clients:
• Edward D. Jones & Co., a unit of Missouri’s Jones Financial Cos., is planning to hire hundreds in Southern California and recently opened a training center in Anaheim.
• San Francisco-based Charles Schwab Corp. has built a network of registered in-vestment advisers here and is looking to grab more of the market.
• St. Louis-based Scottrade Inc., another discount brokerage, runs about 10 braches here and recently opened one in Laguna Niguel.
• New York-based MetLife Inc. is pouring money and resources into an electronic modeling technology that generates different planning scenarios for clients.
Edward Jones
St. Louis-based Edward Jones, which operates 60 offices in the county, plans to hire 400 financial advisers and support positions in Southern California in the next five years.
It now has 120 advisers across the region.
“We want to have locations that are convenient to go to,” said Craig Floerke, who manages the Anaheim training center.
The center opened in June to recruit and support financial advisers, branch office managers and administrative staff.
Edward Jones, which targets small-business owners and working professionals, has been slow to grow its storefront operations here.
Now executives have targeted Southern California, along with Phoenix and Toronto, for expansion.
A typical Edward Jones office is staffed with an adviser and a branch manager.
That provides clients with individual attention in an intimate setting, according to Floerke.
The financial company receives more than 180 applications a day and follows up with about 8% of them, Floerke said.
Last month Edward Jones threw a recruiting event at its 6,000-square-foot Anaheim building and plans to hold similar drives in coming months.
The Anaheim office currently is working with 30 candidates slated for county positions.
Charles Schwab
Charles Schwab has had four county offices for years.
The discount stock brokerage has no plans for expansion.
Instead Charles Schwab is looking to its existing branches in Newport Beach, Irvine, Anaheim and Mission Viejo to drum up business.
The company manages $15 billion in assets in the county.
“Most of our growth comes from referrals, especially being in this county,” said Kris Rindt-Hoffman, a financial consultant in Newport Beach who serves about 400 clients.
Schwab’s Newport Beach office manages the lion’s share of the county’s total at $5.5 billion.
Financial consultant and Vice President William Pugh, who also works in the Newport Beach office, said Schwab’s network of registered investment advisers help clients address needs he might not be able to.
Advisers are vetted at the corporate level and are compensated for the work they provide on behalf of Schwab.
Since the market crash, investors have tempered expectations and become more emotional, adding a new level to the client-adviser relationship, Pugh said.
“Now it’s a much more emotional connection,” said Pugh, who manages investments for about 400 clients. “Every aspect of their financial net worth is being affected in some way.”
Scottrade
Scottrade does 95% of its business online.
So opening a Laguna Niguel branch in June was a significant move for the company to build its operation here.
“We have a lot of clients, especially in the South County area,” said John Pendry, manager of the Laguna Niguel branch. “We want to be a point of contact. We want to be close to where people live and work.”
The online brokerage’s other county offices are in Laguna Hills, Newport Beach, Irvine, Tustin, Anaheim, Huntington Beach and Yorba Linda.
It also has offices just over the county line in Corona and Murrieta.
The branches serve dozens of weekly customers who prefer face-to-face meetings and want more financial education.
Scottrade offers three trading services through Scottrade.com and charges clients $7 per trade.
A new customer needs at least $500 to open an account to access stocks, exchange traded funds, mutual funds and certificates of deposit.
Each Scottrade online service is more advanced than the latter.
The top one, dubbed Scottrade Elite, is accessible with a $25,000 account.
The company does most of its marketing online to attract customers.
Scottrade is one of the Web’s largest advertisers, spokeswoman Jennifer Starkey said.
The company is on a hiring push, boosting its national employee count by 25% in the past 12 months to nearly 3,460 workers.
Scottrade employs 48 people in OC.
MetLife
MetLife, which primarily makes money selling life insurance, is building its advisory business here to handle a growing client base of baby boomers concerned with retirement.
The financial services company has about 30 advisers in the county and 130 in greater Los Angeles.
“Orange County is the biggest market opportunity within the Los Angeles area,” said Paul Justin, managing director of MetLife of Southern California.
He said he wants the number of advisers to grow to 400 here because of the concentration of affluent investors, executives and business owners.
MetLife has poured a lot of funding into electronic investment modeling and case designs to help clients understand how much money they need for a comfortable retirement.
“Most people don’t like to be experimented on,” Justin said. “We created this model and experiment on that. We can try every potential idea and recommendation.”
MetLife, which charges an annual fee for consultation, has about 22,000 OC customers.
Financial adviser Bernd Steinebrunner said his conversations with clients have changed.
Instead of talking about accumulating capital, they talk about maintaining and allocating it, a drastic difference that developed in the recession, he said.
“As they get closer to retirement, their objectives aren’t capital growth, it’s how to distribute it,” he said. “This generation is finding that’s a lot more complicated than growing it.”
