Raymond James is working to bolster its asset management offerings for advisors, with moves including additional model portfolios and separately managed account options, executives said during its annual conference held in Las Vegas this week.
The broadening of what the firm calls its Asset Management Services, or ASM, is being led by Doug Brigman, who was promoted to president of the division in October. Additional portfolio managers and strategies will be just one feature of the push, with executives teasing more to come.
“We’re going to be making significant enhancements to that platform in terms of solutions, pricing, additional competitiveness, and over the next 12 to 18 months, you’re going to hear a lot more about this,” Tash Elywn, president of the firm’s private client group, told advisors during the conference opening.
Raymond James currently provides access to portfolios managed by American Funds, BlackRock and Russell Investments, along with hundreds of SMA strategies, according to company filings.
On the sidelines of the conference, CEO Paul Shoukry said the firm wanted to give its current advisors even more options while also having the most “heavily utilized products” for prospective advisors.
“We are absolutely going to increase the menu of separately managed accounts and (model portfolios) that we offer advisors and clients,” Shoukry said.
Raymond James recently closed an acquisition of asset manager Clark Capital Management Group, announced in January. The Philadelphia-based firm is responsible for $46 billion in assets and brings to Raymond James multi-asset class investments, model portfolios and mutual funds. It also has a high-net-worth service team that offers wealth planning in conjunction with advisors.
Shoukry positioned the deal as more of an opportunity to own an asset manager skilled at working with advisors than a play for its product offerings.
“Clark Capital was a unique, family-owned and run business that served financial advisors with model portfolios and had very good flows because they partnered with advisors to help them pitch business to their clients,” he said. “It was much less about asset management as much as it was about supporting clients and supporting their advisors.”
Shoukry said a current area of demand from advisors has been in certain model portfolio products and tax-loss harvesting. Raymond James also launched a suite of proprietary active ETFs in October, a move that Shoukry said is not unique to peers but is “something that is being driven by demand and feedback we’re getting from our clients.”
Both Shoukry and Elywn emphasized that the expanded investment options are intended to meet the needs of current advisors, with the annual conference’s key theme being that advisors are the “client” for Raymond James’ home office.
The firm has, however, also been highlighting its recruitment and net new asset gains in recent earnings reports. Shoukry contrasts the firm’s “one-on-one” approach—which he said is large enough to reach levels some might label “acquisitions”—with the record levels of consolidation in the RIA space, often driven by private equity.
“In the last five to seven years, a good portion of the trend to the RIA custody space is actually away from independence, because if you’re selling to private equity, you’re actually losing control, right? You’re losing your ownership?” he said.
Earlier this week, ISS Market Intelligence issued new data showing that the RIA space once again saw the most net new advisors in 2025. But the independent broker/dealer space was close behind, with LPL and Raymond James among the most successful firms by net new advisor count.
Raymond James invites prospective advisors to its annual conference, and Shoukry noted that he had met with three of them just in the hours between a town hall he gave on Tuesday morning and an afternoon interview with reporters.
“They’re evaluating Raymond James as an affiliate, but I’m also evaluating them to make sure that they’re good representatives in their communities and that they’re serving clients well,” he said. “That’s something we can only do on a one-by-one basis, not through a large acquisition.”
Shoukry also mentioned his own use of Raymond James’ AI agent, Raimond, which is currently in pilot with advisors and home office employees. The CEO said the agent had been trained, in part, on a “million transcript calls” between advisors and the firm’s service center, and that it will likely be rolled out to all advisors later this year.
“It is trained on almost anything you can think of as it relates to client accounts,” he said, noting he had tested it himself. “It will be a kind of one-stop shop for anything that an advisor, or even down the road that an associate might want.”
