LPL Financial Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:LPLA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Dan Arnold: Yes. I think we’ll continue to see that ongoing trend around consolidation. I think you’re continuing to see innovation around capabilities as well, and so that leads to transactions around a certain type of IP or capability set that firms may want to deploy or utilize in a different way. And then we’re seeing more robust activity around solving for succession planning at the individual adviser level and/or smaller practices level. And so, I think you’re seeing a healthy amount of activity across the ecosystem. We continue to stay active in exploring all of those possibilities, right? And you see us deploying capital, as an example, the closings we did yesterday with Boenning & Scattergood and FRGIS. I would just remind you our framework for exploring those possibilities, and you know these, first, it’s in sort of side that what I would call growth opportunities in traditional markets where we see opportunity for purposes of growth to potentially acquire a practice, and Boenning & Scattergood would be a great example of that, what would be a great example of that.

We also look in that second category where we can add capabilities faster through an acquisition than building them ourselves. We believe we’ve got to stay open and agile and nimble around that framework. And then the final one, the third one, which is a little newer one and is aligned with this new capability of liquidity and succession, is putting capital work through acquiring these practices and being that bridge to that future successors. So, I think that’s where we’re active, that’s where we’re exploring potential possibilities. And we see pretty good activity going on in the consumer market.

Devin Ryan: Great. Thank you so much.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Michael Cho from JPMorgan. Your question please.

Michael Cho: Hi. Good afternoon Dan and Matt. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to touch on — just to kind of zoom out a little bit and touch on the pricing trends you’re seeing in your business. I guess just given the environment we’re all operating in, I mean, are there some areas where you’re looking to either take price or actually invest in price as you look ahead given all the different initiatives that you’re dealing out there with the business?

Dan Arnold : Yes, Michael, I’ll take that one, and certainly, Matt, you add anything you want at the end. Look, we look at pricing as above our overall offering. Think about such capability, services, technology. We look at pricing as part of our overall investment strategy, if you will. And I think as we shared in the past, we’ve created a reoccurring theme of investing back into the platform, specifically trying to use price to help our advisers differentiate and win in the marketplace. And so I think that places that we’ve been historically focused on for the past, call it, four to five years has been typically around the advisory platform, right, 70%, 75% of new assets — sorry, yes, new cash is going to those types of solutions, and we want to make sure that we’re enriching the appeal of them.

And so as we look at 2023, you’ll see us continue to lower pricing around our centrally managed platforms as a way to create more applications for advisers to leveraging middle all of those, refined with the enriched capability set that we’re adding to them, more and more using them versus that was the type of purchase. You’re also seeing us look at transaction charges in certain areas where we’re being very tactical around that. Although this holistic sort of lowering of transaction, we’re trying to be very tactical about where we make those changes, such that we actually make the adjustments on where they make the most sense for our advisers that ultimately help them. And so I think those are a couple of examples that we’ll continue to pursue this year.

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