State Street and LPL recruit the platform builders

Pete Dorsey has run both the bank channel and the RIA technology disruptor, and State Street has just put him in charge of turning a minority stake in Apex into something that can actually hold RIA assets. The platform war has moved from recruiting advisors to recruiting the operators who build the custody and technology stacks those advisors will eventually use.

State Street hired Dorsey as wealth custody chief risk officer after his tenures at LPL and Altruist, with what the coverage called an explicit mandate: turn the Apex minority stake into a real custody platform. Dorsey's value lies less in a book of business than in knowing how bank-channel custody works and how a technology-first RIA custodian scales. LPL made two technology moves in the same direction, promoting Greg Gates to group managing director and chief product and technology officer while hiring Wells Fargo's Jonathan Lewis as chief technology and information officer. With Gates already inside LPL and Lewis arriving from the bank channel, the two give the firm an executive bench that has built both bank-channel custody and RIA-facing technology.

One level down, Raymond James lost $545 million when two California teams left for Wells Fargo's FiNet independent channel, then answered by hiring a Wells Fargo veteran. That is the round-robin of independent-channel recruiting, now paired with an executive recruiting round that sits above the revenue producers.

The advisor-level custody war has not started: PWD tracked seven custodian changes across a month in which 577 advisors moved, while Wells Fargo and Stifel are winning advisors with lending capacity, not custody deals. The executive hires matter because firms that wait for custody switches to appear in advisor movement data will be late.

Vanguard's $4.6 billion Altruist deal provides the backdrop, resetting the custody race around the advisor's screen rather than the back office. State Street's Dorsey hire and LPL's technology bench are early bets on that same front; Raymond James is doing it in pieces with a Wells Fargo veteran.