BY ERIC RASMUSSEN

Raymond James’ s shares dropped more than 8 % from its February 9 high over the course of a day. Ameriprise, Charles Schwab, Stifel and Morgan Stanley all saw their stock prices sag on the grid. Perhaps one of the starkest declines was LPL Financial’ s— it had lost almost a quarter of its value, falling from $ 392 to $ 300 by the end of February, threatened not only by Altruist. LPL responded with its own deal to expand its relationship with Anthropic, the maker of Claude, to integrate advisor-centric AI for its professionals to use.

Investors likely feared AI Armageddon— that the computers threatening to replace human workers in everything from high-level management jobs to trucking to software development had finally come for brokerages, custodians and financial advisors, too.

LPL seemingly took an“ if you can’ t beat’ em, join’ em approach” with its Anthropic partnership.“ It’ s a good move by LPL because they understand that partnering with one of these service model providers will get you some insider information on what’ s coming,” says Hesom Parhizkar, the chief technology officer at AdvizorPro who has spent a lot of his career trying to get advisory firms comfortable with technology.“ With that partnership, they will dedicate some resources to kind of help LPL versus LPL having to hire their own consultants to understand this.” That should give the firm a leg up on competitors, he says.

Jamie Price, the chief executive officer at Osaic, agrees that the tech upheaval is one of the biggest changes in the broker-dealer business. He waxes idealistic about thirdparty software demos he’ s seen where an AI chatbot sits patiently listening to an advisor and client discussion and then spits out a financial plan based on what it’ s heard. Price says artificial intelligence administrative, scheduling and notetaking tools designed for financial advisors are getting eaten up by his reps.

“ In the last 12 months we have put Jump, Zocks, GReminder, Vanilla, and Finby on our platform,” he says.“ The take-up rate for Zocks and Jump in particular has been one of the fastest take-up rates for a tool we’ ve put on our platform ever. And I believe we’ re in the first inning of this. Jump and Zocks and these types of tools may not be around in two more years. You may see iterations of them or new entrants in the marketplace.”

Parhizkar and other observers think financial service company investors have recently overreacted to the AI threat the same way they once trembled at robo-advisors, which critics say never grabbed more than a tiny fraction of the market($ 1 trillion of AUM amid $ 36 trillion in total advised assets, according to Morningstar). Morningstar, in fact, said in a research note that the financial services companies that sold off after the Altruist news had in fact become good values— that the per share fair value of LPL was $ 540. Investors would do well to buy it, Morningstar declared.

The argument for AI is that it’ s going to take on more of the small tasks( like notetaking) currently on advisors’ plates,

IMAGERY VIA GETTY IMAGES MARCH / APRIL 2026 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 23