February 18, 2025
Jason Diamond Quoted
By Dan Shaw, FinancialPlanning
In an industry known for a spectacularly high dropout rate, advisor training programs can come in for criticism.
But two brokers on Financial Planning’s top 40 under 40 list, Jens Pascucci and Dominic Altobelli of Merrill, say their careers are proof these endeavors remain worthwhile.
Merrill has long had a reputation for “training the Street” and has boasted the most advisors on Financial Planning’s top 40 under 40 rankings for six years in a row. Pascucci said he was aware of the firm’s training program when he was looking to move into the financial services industry.
How advisors can stay relevant and establish business continuity even as client needs evolve.
But before committing to any company, he made it a point to look through industry publication rankings of advisors and cold-called some planners to see what they thought of various firms.
“I talked with people actually who were at other firms, even who went through Merrill’s training program, and spoke highly of it,” Pascucci said. “And so that, to me, was a very strong recommendation.”
Thirteen years later, Pascucci is producing $12.9 million in annual revenue from a book with $3.2 billion under management. Pascucci said Merrill’s 43-month-long training program helped him secure the licensing he needed to work as a broker and paid for him to become a certified financial planner and obtain other certifications. Perhaps most importantly, it gave him access to the firm’s market executive in Seattle, who could rattle off the names of the top 25 advisors in the area.
Yet success stories like Pascucci’s remain uncommon in an industry in which demand for advisory services always seems to outrun the supply. The consulting giant McKinsey estimated in a report this month that the U.S. will be short by 100,000 advisors by 2034, largely driven by a prediction that the number of households with $500,000 or more to invest is increasing by 4% to 5% percent a year.
McKinsey noted the industry’s total headcount has meanwhile increased by only 0.3% a year in the past 10 years and predicted it will begin decreasing by 0.2% annually. As many others have noted, advisor retirement is the big culprit. Roughly 110,000 advisors, managing 42% of the assets in the industry, are expected to retire in the next decade.
Training programs could certainly help reverse this trend. But industry recruiters are skeptical of whether the available ones are up to the task.
Jason Diamond, the vice president of the recruitment firm Diamond Consultants, said wirehouses like Merrill and Morgan Stanley are at the forefront of trying to train the next generation of advisors. But that doesn’t necessarily mean their training programs are runaway successes; it’s just that, aside from training offered by large regional firms like Edward Jones, there isn’t a lot of competition.
Diamond said the dropout rates in even the best training programs remain notoriously high — commonly pegged at anywhere from 75% to 90%. If only a small proportion of all aspirants actually go on to become a full-time advisor, then the training programs are doing very little to alleviate the headcount shortage, he said.
“In a lot of these programs, they seem to know what they are doing, and they seem to have the recipe for success and the right formula,” Diamond said. “But they still have a long way to go.”
Diamond said a high failure rate isn’t necessarily a disaster for firms offering training programs. It’s often costly to keep advisors around who aren’t producing much on their own. And then the firms usually get to keep whatever book of business a departing advisor was able to build before leaving.
