Wealth advisers set up shop with a shared back office

Instead of schmoozing with clients over lunch, Brown brings in business via a storm of tweets and posts on his blog, The Reformed Broker, that he generates from a cramped, sublet office space in midtown Manhattan.

Much as Amazon has disrupted the retail industry by revolutionizing shopping habits, Schwab and firms like it have empowered a fast-growing vanguard of wealth advisers who offer independent and conflict-free financial advice by relying on easy-to-use technology.

[...] sitting on more than $4 trillion in assets, registered investment advisers are posing a direct threat to the old model of huddling with brokers from Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley and following their advice — for a hefty fee, usually — about which stocks, bonds or mutual funds to buy.

“People are now saying, ‘With Schwab or TD Ameritrade I can do this myself,’” said Julie Cooling, chief executive of RIA Channel, a research firm that tracks the growth of registered investment advisers.

Founded on the principle of providing low-cost stock trades to individual investors, Charles Schwab’s growth in recent years has been propelled by its adviser segment, which offers a wide array of custodial services to registered investment advisers as well as access to the Schwab mutual fund supermarket.

More than 7,500 registered investment advisers use Schwab to park assets, giving it, according to the company’s calculation, a 29 percent market share and putting it far ahead of competitors TD Ameritrade, Fidelity and Bank of New York Mellon’s Pershing subsidiary.

Advisers can call on a Schwab expert for help in setting up a business or for legal advice in dealing with a complex trust, as well as execute quick and easy trades of individual securities or mutual funds.

Above all there is silence:

Since more than 95 percent of executions, be it the selling of a security or the buying of a mutual fund, are done electronically, there are no shouts or exclamations to be heard.

Outside of Vanguard and BlackRock, which together control nearly 70 percent of the market for exchange-traded funds, few financial firms have played as prominent a role as Schwab in feeding the ETF frenzy.

According to Cerulli, a research firm, 80 percent of registered investment advisers rely on exchange-traded funds to give their clients exposure to various investment strategies.

While Vanguard and BlackRock have been the two main choices for registered investment advisers, Schwab has introduced its own branded fleet of tracking funds, which it prices well below the peer group and in some cases offers free to clients.