GRP Recruits Three from 401(k) Advisors

Jason Jeskey is a former practicing ERISA attorney, who joined 401(k) Advisors in 2011 as a senior plan consultant and ERISA specialist. Bill Chetney, GRP’s CEO, says Jeskey will be GRP’s general and ERISA counsel. Kyle Posvistak, an investment adviser representative, joined 401(k) Advisors in 2007 to assist the RFP/benchmarking team, conducting DC searches from $1 million to $900 million in plan assets. Austin Gwilliam is a bilingual senior plan consultant who joined 401(k) Advisors in 2005.  Posvistak and Gwilliam will be part of the team in the GRP home office. “I am excited to have them on the team,” Chetney says.

 

GRP is a new retirement plan advisory firm and office of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJ) being built out of LPL’s acquisition of broker/dealer Financial Telesis (FTi) (see “LPL and Financial Telesis Create New RIA Firm“). GRP will team with LPL’s Hybrid RIA platform. Financial Telesis’s founder and CEO, Jim Williams, is president of GRP. Although the firm has launched, the official transfer date of the Financial Telesis advisers is August 14, and all the advisers’ securities licenses will be at LPL, with the RIA at GRP. 

 

Chetney says of the need to form GRP within LPL, all advisers are licensed with LPL but are required to have an office of supervisory jurisdiction (OSJ) at the broker/dealer (B/D). GRP is going to be the only “retirement-centric OSJ,” Chetney says, which he says is the last piece of the puzzle for LPL to fully specialize in retirement plans and “be dominant in this space.”

 

According to Chetney, part of the reason he was able to recruit the three men from 401k Advisors was because of the level of investment LPL is making in worksite education for participants. GRP is able to leverage the tools of LPL (because all the advisers have their securities licenses at LPL), making the OSJ more attractive for the retirement-focused advisers, who will not only be able to serve their plan sponsor clients but make a difference in the retirement success of plan participants.

 

Chetney hopes that GRP, and its leadership, will also be attractive to many of the “artists formerly known as NRP,” advisers he is now hoping will join GRP for their OSJ, many of whom are under home office jurisdiction now.