At a glance
- Brent Besinger, a managing director, founded the firm in 2007 and set it up as an independent RIA in 2022 after a 24-year career at Lincoln Financial Advisors.
- Beacon's seven-person team keeps its client relationships; what changes is the platform partner behind its broker-dealer affiliation, from Private Client Services to Osaic.
- Besinger's decision was shaped in part by a longstanding relationship with John DiMonda, head of Advisor Direct at Osaic, with whom he worked for more than 15 years, InvestmentNews reported.
Beacon Financial Group, an Aurora, Ohio RIA with nearly $1 billion in client assets, joined Osaic's Empowered Independence W-2 channel, citing succession planning, InvestmentNews reported Nov. 2.
Brent Besinger, a managing director, founded the firm in 2007 and set it up as an independent RIA in 2022 after a 24-year career at Lincoln Financial Advisors. Beacon had operated as an independent RIA with a broker-dealer affiliation through Private Client Services. Its seven-person team serves more than 120 families on financial planning, investment management, retirement plan services and multigenerational wealth work, and several members have worked with Besinger for more than a decade.
Beacon's seven-person team keeps its client relationships; what changes is the platform partner behind its broker-dealer affiliation, from Private Client Services to Osaic. Principals weighing a similar succession question face the same trade-off: keep an independent RIA's overhead and economics, or move the infrastructure to a platform and take a W-2 role.
Besinger's decision was shaped in part by a longstanding relationship with John DiMonda, head of Advisor Direct at Osaic, with whom he worked for more than 15 years, InvestmentNews reported. "When we started exploring succession planning options, our biggest priority was finding a partner that would allow us to continue running our business the way we always have, with our clients' needs guiding every decision," Besinger said.
Osaic launched Empowered Independence in 2023. Cindy Hamel, who heads the channel, has said the firm expects the number of external teams joining to grow and that the group aims to be "much more aggressive externally" in pursuing prospects. Osaic is a private equity-owned network with more than 10,000 advisors.
Osaic logged 18 recorded advisor moves in the past 12 months, counting arrivals and departures, according to Moves Wire. The most recent, on Oct. 23, was Mary Steele and John Boyle's move from Stifel Independent Advisors to Osaic with a three-person Freehold Wealth Management team and $576 million in client assets.
Reported by the Moves desk from InvestmentNews and Moves Wire. Published . Corrections