Richardson Wealth adds retention bonuses for advisors

Richardson Wealth will pay out $15.2 million in retention bonuses to advisors who were with the firm in 2020 and remain there until at least November 2026, parent company RF Capital Group Inc. announced Friday.

The payout represents the second tranche of recognition awards the brokerage is granting to long-serving advisors as part of an agreement reached during the firm’s reorganization in 2020.

Advisors who controlled approximately 91% of Richardson Wealth’s assets in Oct. 2020 were still with the firm, said Kish Kapoor, president and CEO of RF Capital, in a conference call announcing the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings.

“To me, that [shows] a very high level of confidence in all of the things that we’ve been investing in on their behalf,” Kapoor said.

Tim Wilson, CFO of RF Capital, said the $15.2 million would be amortized at approximately $5 million per year between 2024 and 2026.

Richardson Wealth advisors who joined the firm since the reorganization received their own recognition awards when they joined, Kapoor said.

Richardson Wealth reported assets under administration of $35.2 billion at the end of Q4, up from $34.7 billion at the end of the previous quarter and $34.9 billion at the end of the same quarter last year.

“AUA increased as recruiting, net new assets, and strong markets in the fourth quarter offset the departure of advisor teams that managed $2.5 billion in AUA,” the firm reported in its earnings release.

The firm added three advisor teams that managed $800 million in November.

Richardson Wealth had 157 advisory teams at the end of 2023, down from 159 at the end of the previous quarter and 163 at the end of the same quarter last year.

The firm has a goal of reaching $100 billion in AUA over the next few years.

Speaking before the earnings announcement, Victor Adesanya, vice-president with Morningstar DBRS in Toronto, noted that Richardson Wealth’s AUA “hasn’t changed significantly on a year-over-year basis. For them to reach that ambitious goal, they need M&A activity or to aggressively acquire advisor teams.”

On the call, Wilson said that “in 2024, AUA will continue to be driven by growth in client assets and is expected to correlate highly with equity market returns and recruiting activity. And we are confident that we will see an uptick in recruiting activity this year.”

Dave Kelly, who joined Richardson Wealth as COO in January, said on the call that the firm’s investments in technology have created a foundation “that really drives scale” as the firm adds new advisors.

Kapoor said he has been “devoting a lot of my time and energy” to identifying possible acquisition targets.

“I would suspect that we’re going to have to look a lot more before we find the [acquisition] that really perfectly fits,” Kapoor said. “I think this is an early part of our journey.”

RF Capital reported revenue of $86.8 million for Q4 2023, down from $88.5 million in Q4 2022, and $351.1 million for the year, down from $354 million in 2022.

Expenses were $36.4 million for the quarter, up from $34.9 million for the same quarter last year, and $150.9 million for 2023, up from $151.0 million in 2022.

RF Capital announced a cash dividend of 23.3313 cents per series B preferred share, payable on March 29 to preferred shareholders of record on March 15.