Trading Places

NEW YORK (Reuters) – In a typical week, Scott Dell’Orfano, executive vice president of Fidelity’s Institutional Wealth Service, would meet with three or four teams of financial advisers coming into his Boston office.

But on a recent rainy Wednesday, he met with four groups before noon.

More brokers are considering moving from a big brokerage house to set up their own shop and aligning themselves with a custodial firm such as Fidelity, the big mutual fund firm.

While the adviser teams — numbering anywhere from three to a dozen — are just kicking the tires and considering whether to leave a big firm for greener pastures, the number of visits has intensified lately.

“We have been seeing a trend in top producers researching and setting up their own shop in what three years ago was a fairly unknown space — that being the RIA (Registered Independent Adviser) model,” Dell’Orfano said.

Fidelity said last week that 55 “breakaway brokers” — a term used to describe advisers or brokers leaving a large company to set up independent shops — selected the company as the custodian for their newly established independent firms during the first six months of 2008.

The newly independent firms brought more than $7 billion in assets through July 1, more than double the assets from new breakaway clients during all of 2007, according to Fidelity.

Click here to read the rest of the story.