## [# Dynasty’s Shirl Penney On the Billion Dollar RIA Breakaway](/sections/conferences/dynastys-shirl-penney-billion-dollar-ria-breakaway) # Dynasty’s Shirl Penney On the Billion Dollar RIA Breakaway There's an advisory revolution happening, fueled by capital and enabled by tech, that makes OpenArc's recently announced breakaway the marker of this new trend towards independence. Dynasty's Shirl Penney shares insights into the process, weighs in on the "cyborging" of the industry, and how Dynasty uses AI in its practices. [![ETF.com](/sites/default/files/styles/author_image_icon/public/2023-12/etf.com_400x400.png?itok=LO34LQE1)](/contributors/etfcom-staff) [By ETF.com Staff](/contributors/etfcom-staff) Dec 16, 2025 Edited by: ETF.com Staff [ + Follow ](/etf/login) Share Email LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('js-dfp-tag-article_page_302x26'); }); Loading let duration = 0, percent = '0', new_percent = ''; jwplayer("etfVideo").setup({ playlist: "https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/bqGKr98i", aspectratio: "16:9", autostart: "viewable", ga: {} }); jwplayer().on('time', function(e) { duration = e.duration if (e.position >= duration * 0.25){ percent = '25'; } if (e.position >= duration * 0.50){ percent = '50'; } if (e.position >= duration * 0.75){ percent = '75'; } if (e.position == duration){ percent = '100'; } if (new_percent != percent){ // GTM Datalayer - Video Event dataLayer.push({ 'event': 'video', 'video_id': 'bqGKr98i', 'video_percent': percent, 'video_url': 'http://www.etf.com/markdownify/node/134376' }); new_percent = percent; } }); The future is independence, or at least it could be more feasibly than many advisors think. Shirl Penney, President and CEO of Dynasty Financial Planners, discussed Dynasty's role in OpenArc's recent breakout to independence, the evolution of Dynasty and its services, and how artificial intelligence is being integrated internally with ETF.com's Dave Nadig at the Schwab IMPACT 2025 Conference in November. The following is a full transcript of their conversation. ## Transcript **Nadig:** Shirl Penney, thank you so much for taking some time with us. Obviously in a huge conference. You guys are a big presence here, and you've done some really huge deals lately. Talk to me a little bit about how this industry is changing really at the top end. **Penney:** Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, and what we've seen is bigger teams are looking at going independent. There's been a lot of talk here at the conference. I've been stopped by pretty much everyone asking about OpenArc, you know, which is a recent transaction that we did, maybe the biggest team ever to move, let alone… **Nadig:** 100 and something billion, right? **Penney:** Yeah, maybe the biggest team ever to move, let alone go independent. They were a corporate services team where they cover stock plans, corporate retirement plans, and then cover on the wealth side the assets of those executives. One of the biggest firms in the entire industry. You know, would have been unfathomable to think of a team like that leaving 10 years ago, but given the advancements and availability of capital, technology, platforms like Dynasty, scaled partners like Schwab, the ability to leverage their stock plan side of the house, and this constant growth and evolution of the road to independence has all led to the point where now literally the largest teams in the industry, if they desire to move and own and operate their own business, they can do that. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('js-dfp-tag-in_article_unit'); }); ## The Evolution of Dynasty **Nadig:** Let's unpack some of what it takes to get that done. You mentioned the capital part of it. You guys are an investment bank now, and that's kind of unique in the space. How did you make the decision that collecting and distributing capital was going to be a critical part of your business? **Penney:** You know, we made that decision by listening to our clients. So, when Dynasty launched 15 years ago, we were primarily a wealth tech business. So, running all the middle and back office for the advisors, really about freeing up their time so that they can take better care of their clients, go get new ones, or build a better business. As the first couple years passed, the advisors came to us and said, “We need help on the investment platform side.” So, Dynasty's 15 years old. About three or four years in, we launched what's now the fifth largest TAMP in the industry. And we built it all homegrown over that time frame. So, SMAs, UMAs, access to alternatives, access to credit, all of that's been built out on our investment platform. So, think of us on the wealth tech at about 150 billion, let's say by the end of the first quarter, about 100 billion of that then gets invested through our investment platform. About four years ago, our advisor clients were coming to us and saying, “We need access to investment banking. We might want to look to do a recap, take some chips off the table. We might want to use you to help us on the buy side, to go buy another RIA to grow inorganically. We might need capital, whether it's debt or equity capital, but we need someone who's aligned with us, can sit on the same side table with us, and help us with our capital needs.” So, we launched Dynasty's Investment Bank. It's co-led by a former senior banker from Goldman Sachs, a former senior investment banker from UBS. We have other bankers from Raymond James. We have a whole team of analysts. I think we'll see, but I think we'll lead the league tables this year in the space for the number of deals, but more than that, substantial size deals, complex deals, cross-border deals. We've even done deals for public companies. So, why that benefits all of the advisors in our network is it gives us pretty close to perfect information in terms of what's happening in the space around price, structure, transactions from an M&A standpoint. **Nadig:** Right, and it sounds like that's not just M&A for Dynasty. It's M&A for all of the businesses that work with Dynasty, right? So, that's kind of an incredible offering that requires a lot of flexibility. How does an advisor who's sort of maybe sitting in a shop right now, knows they've got a great team, knows that they've got clients that will come with them wherever they're going to go, how do they think about where to interact there? Because there's a big difference between coming to you saying, "Hey, we need a lot of capital. We need a full takeout. We want the employees to own the firm at the end of the day," to "Hey, you know, we kind of just need some TAMP services and maybe some access to products we can't get ourselves." But you guys service all those kinds of clients. ## Integrated Platform Pioneers and Meeting Advisors Where They Are **Penney:** We do. And, we really invented the integrated platform model. So, we were the first players to bring all of the integrated technology stack with the investment platform, capital, investment banking. And what we didn't talk about is we have a fourth business called Dynasty Connect, which is a leads business where we connect an end consumer who's looking for an independent advisor. But to answer your question more specifically, we try to meet the advisors where they are. Where they are in terms of life cycle. Some of them are getting ready to launch a business. Some of them are already independent, but coming to us to outsource the grow. They need to unlock some growth potential, rapidly professionalize the business. And then the third life cycle, some are coming to us to help with succession, right? Making sure they have the right internal succession, maybe external succession. They want to dress the firm up to get ready for a sale process. So, we have the ability to meet them wherever they are. Then where they're coming from, I think everyone knows Dynasty, obviously because we do these massive billion-dollar plus breakaways. The reality is we love the $300, $400 million breakaway, too. And then helping them grow. We're known for that. But in reality, almost as many of our clients were already independent. They were RIAs that their growth had stymied. They've read about the high margins that we help deliver through synthetic scale with RIAs, and they're coming to us. We typically start as a consultant, working with them, looking at their entire infrastructure. We help them build a gap analysis from where they are now to where they want to go. And unlike a traditional consultant, who then gives you the report and wishes you luck, we'll sit in the trenches with you and actually do the work, and help you grow the business to achieve those goals. So, already independent, IBD advisors that have outgrown that chassis, want to go fully independent, and then the large-scale breakaways. And then the last type of advisors that are coming to us are the ones that want all the benefits of independence, but maybe don't want to run their own firm. So, they're looking to be introduced to another firm on our platform, and then that becomes an M&A transaction, which drives inorganic growth to the RIAs that we serve. This year, we might do 10 new store sales, 10 new brands coming onto our platform, but we'll do 25 M&A deals. So, we're doing more M&A deals into our network firms than even standalone at this point. **Nadig:** I mean, if I step back a little bit, as somebody who's been watching the growth of financial advisors since the '80s, it seems like what you've done is replicate a lot of what people said on paper wirehouses were supposed to do. But what you've done is invert that model and say, "Hey, you know what, let's make everybody an equity owner, and let's just give them the services they need," as opposed to locking them under an umbrella for the rest of their lives. A missing piece we haven't talked about that those wirehouse competitors are often highlighted for is the funnel of new folks coming in, the younger advisors, the everybody knows about the training programs. And for a long time, even in the RIA market, that was kind of the feeder program for RIAs. You got people out of the wirehouse model. They moved over to RIAs. How are you addressing that? As clearly, you're taking more and more business from the wirehouse, we can't expect that to last forever. **Penney:** Yeah, well, look, there is a lot in that question. It has very much been a one-way street. There are no break back brokers, right? **Nadig:** I've never heard of one. ## Better Informed Clients Are On the Move **Penney:** Yeah, the advisors are coming this way. Clients are coming this way. Actually, the media doesn't talk as much about this as perhaps they should. The breakaway client movement is actually happening at a pace of 4-to-1 over the breakaway advisor movement. So, if you – we're here at Schwab IMPACT, and let's say in any given year Schwab adds a couple hundred billion dollars in new assets to the RIA custody side. That might be 50 billion in new advisors coming in and bringing their clients with them, but it's 150 billion of organic growth for the installed base of RIAs, which is an end client deciding to make the move. **Nadig:** They fired their wirehouse guy. **Penney:** Yeah, and because the consumer is wanting to get advice separate from where products are manufactured and sold. So, the consumer is becoming more aware of some of the inherent conflicts in the siloed model. Where you have an advisor, custody, and product manufacturing in the same silo, right. The opportunity for conflict is much higher versus what we call at Dynasty the "triangulation of advice". Advice separate from safe custody and separate from where product's manufactured, and then Dynasty ties it together. That fiduciary model that used to be reserved 100 years ago for someone with a billion dollars, we've helped democratize it to make it available now to somebody with much less. What are the wirehouses going to do to answer your question? I think that our biggest competition's inertia, right? So, there's a lot of people, even though they might think it would be better for them or their clients, aren't going to move, and that's fine. They're, you know, good is the enemy of great, complacency can be a challenge. But some people enjoy it. But what I like to say to people is, get educated. If you get educated and you feel that where you are is what's best for you and best for your clients, then God bless. But take the time to go out and get educated. I think what the wirehouses and banks will do, probably on an accelerated basis – we've seen this with Goldman Sachs and others – starting to offer and open up the platform more. Because it's undeniable in terms of assets and advisors, but assets making their way to independents. And if you're a capital market service provider, if you're an asset manager, you want to go where the money is, right? So, you're figuring out, “What is my independent RIA strategy?” Which is why we're seeing a lot of asset managers come to Dynasty because they want to get connected at scale with all the advisors that we serve. It's very hard for them kind of door-to-door, hand-to-hand combat, going out and sitting with every RIA. But they can partner with a firm like Dynasty, deliver all their intellectual content through our desktop, and more efficiently get connected with the advisors. **Nadig:** Does that put you back in that old wirehouse gatekeeper role though, or do advisors basically have access to whatever they think is right for their clients, and you just have sort of your own selections? **Penney:** Yeah, our job is to make things easy and convenient for the advisor. The fundamental difference in the model, and this gets to your question, which is a good one, we work for the advisor. An advisor at a wirehouse works for the house, right? So, you know, they may have different incentives to drive certain products that are manufactured there. They're limited on choice. If you're at a wirehouse and you have a client that needs a mortgage, right? You have one option. Inside. You have a concentrated stock position because you're an executive at pick a company, and you want to have it hedged. You have one option. And if the advisor said,”There's another firm that would be better”, and they referred that out, they would be fired for “selling away”, right? So, part of being a fiduciary is choice. So, what Dynasty set out to do is not level the playing field to your earlier question, but to tilt it in favor of an independent advisor that's powered by Dynasty. Think of us as that Intel sticker, that's putting significant scale, access, pricing power, industry connectivity behind them so that by the end of the first quarter, you know, we hit 150 billion, that's a 150 billion dollar institutional client on the Street. So, that's going to help a retired school teacher, a fireman who's covered by an independent advisor in my home state of Maine, to be able to get that same type of triangulated advisory model, the same way that a billionaire would have received it in the past. So, that's a big part of my “Why” in terms of why we started the business, is to democratize that advisory model. To eliminate so many of the product sale challenges that people are oftentimes not aware of to make better quality financial advice, financial literacy available for more Americans. ## An Industry Hitting Crisis? **Nadig:** Gates and hurdles. Yeah, I totally get it. Let's talk about that, the lower end of the food chain. We talked about the sort of wirehouse development model for kids coming out of college, want to get into the industry. How does Dynasty think about that? Obviously, you've got lots of independent advisor firms. It's part of your group. Not all of them have the same demands to get a bunch of paraplanners going in, but some of them do. And I've heard from a lot of advisors here, they may be hiring fewer of those folks because they think AI is going to help. What's your take on that? **Penney:** Yeah, I love that question, too. And I would say to anyone who's watching this conversation, whether you're a young professional or someone who might be in another profession looking to transition over, if you're a veteran. Please consider this industry. We need the talent. When we started Dynasty 15 years ago, there were over 600,000 financial advisors. Since that time, that number's down to 275,000, right? And to your point, unfortunately, no one – whether it's the RIAs, the banks, the wires, IBDs – is doing a good job at scale of bringing new talent into the space. At the same time, you've had the largest wealth creation in the history of the country. So, you have more people in need of financial advice and fewer people to deliver it. Which means those advisors that can attract talent, who can tech-enable their business so that they can cover more clients at scale utilizing technology are going to win on a massive disproportionate basis. But there is a fundamental supply and demand imbalance right now in what I would call an essential industry, right? I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent, but financial wellness of our country, right, is a matter of national security. Financial wellness of pension funds and endowments mean is your retirement going to be there or not? And at a day and an age where 75% of Americans can't put their hand on $1,000, that means they're one leaky roof or broken-down car, if you're a single parent, away from disaster. And the way you improve that in this country isn't by selling stuff to people that they don't necessarily need, right? It's through giving independent, fiduciary advice, guidance, education, and I think that will help improve financial wellness for all the constituencies that I just mentioned across the country. And that's a big part of why we're so passionate about driving the independent wealth management movement forward. ## How Dynasty Uses AI **Nadig:** What do you think about the AI side of that though? That's already becoming a little bit of an old saw of, "I don't need to hire so many juniors." To me, that sounds like you're hollowing out your growth. What do you think? **Penney:** I think AI is going to be a significant disruptor and enhancer, both, in the wealth management space. I think that the industry as a whole – specific to the advisors – is heading towards a cyborging of the industry. Because the reality is, and there are some good reasons and some not so good reasons, that you're going to have some type of life event. A good reason might be I'm selling my company, I'm getting ready to retire. A bad reason might be I'm dealing with health issue, or going through a divorce, or whatever it might be. That's a moment in time where I want to talk to a human. An advisor who has empathy, proximity, understanding of what I'm dealing with. But then once those tough decisions get made, there's elements of the business that are more able to be commoditized and tech-enabled, where AI can help implement on behalf of the decisions that get made. And I think the firms that get that solved for the fastest are the ones that are like I said earlier, going to win disproportionately. At Dynasty, we've set up AI labs. We took some of our best engineers, best programmers, pulled them out of line production, threw them in an incubation innovation lab, and said, "Look, help us solve for a lot… significant issues across the business, issues for our advisors through AI." And some of the things that were already put into production are things like client planning documentation. I have a client coming in, maybe it's last minute, and I can say, "Hey, Dynasty, put together a full report on the profile of the Joneses. Give me a full debrief of the last meeting we had, and what are the three things that we need to make sure we address in this meeting?" Boom. Because we have a private version of ChatGPT that we keep behind our firewall with all the client data. Because we've invested so heavily in our data lake, right? Because obviously, data is the food and fuel for AI, we're able to deliver things like that. We just rolled out a new bot that we turned into an avatar that's delivering weekly market commentary at scale for our advisors. So, we have some advisors who might have a thousand clients. Markets are pretty volatile right now. There's a lot of activity, obviously, going on. We can put it in at the end of the week, the market commentary, because the data lake sits on top of the CRM. It call pull the contact information, the names of the client, determines how they want to receive it – the video – either it's via text or via an email. And then in a three or four-minute quick hit video, they're getting a full download of what happened in the market that week. now, if they want to call their advisor after that, they certainly can, but that's creating significant efficiencies with personal customization by utilizing AI on top of the data infrastructure that we built. **Nadig:** Crazy. Exciting times. **Penney:** Yeah, absolutely. **Nadig:** Thanks so much. Cheers. *Discover the news, data, and voices shaping the ETF community. Follow along* [***here***](https://www.etf.com/advisor-center)*.* [ + Follow ](/etf/login) [ETF.com Staff](/contributors/etfcom-staff) etf.com is the single source for ETF intelligence. 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