LPL taps Edward Jones executive to lead corporate strategy

LPL Financial has hired a former Edward Jones exec as executive vice president of corporate strategy, adding a client experience-focused leader as the firm pushes further into growth, technology and RIA M&A.

In his new role, Ilan Davidovici will oversee LPL’s corporate strategy team and work across the business to set long-term goals, prioritize initiatives and evaluate new opportunities. The move comes as LPL manages the complexity of a platform that now supports more than 32,000 financial advisors and the wealth units of roughly 1,100 financial institutions, servicing about $2.3 trillion in brokerage and advisory assets for 8 million investors.

Davidovici spent more than five years at Edward Jones in a series of client experience leadership roles.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he helped lead strategy, design and measurement of the firm’s client and branch experience, while implementing an “experience first operating model” aimed at improving outcomes for advisors and end clients. He also described his remit as ensuring that more than 19,000 advisors and 7 million clients “have the people, process, tools and support to accomplish what’s most important to them.”

He served as client experience leader at Edward Jones from March 2019 to January 2020, then as principal and general partner for client experience from December 2019 to October 2023, before moving into the broader mandate of client and branch experience management role.

Across those positions, he was involved in experience and growth initiatives and in cross-functional digital and firm transformation projects, including a Tinder-inspired matchmaking program to connect advisors and clients.

Earlier in his career, Davidovici held senior roles at Salesforce, where he helped launch and scale its global wealth and asset management offering, and at Deloitte Consulting, where he led transformation work for large financial institutions. He also co-founded Citadel Trust Advisors, a growth-focused wealth and trust administration firm.

Marc Cohen, LPL’s chief growth officer, cast the hire as a way to stitch together corporate strategy, digital transformation and front-line experience. In the company’s announcement, Cohen said Davidovici’s expertise “will be instrumental as we advance our long-term vision,” and that his leadership is expected to support efforts to deliver better experiences for advisors and clients.

The appointment lands during an active M&A phase for LPL – most notably including its purchase of Commonwealth last year – and a more volatile environment for private equity-backed aggregators.

In an interview with InvestmentNews in December, Cohen said some large platforms relying on private equity “are going to have a challenge continuing to compete as a meaningful platform in the space” as capital expectations limit what they can reinvest. He added that those constraints could push some firms “to sell or take investment.”

LPL itself has been willing to put balance sheet capital to work, including a recent minority staking transaction involving Private Advisor Group, an RIA and OSJ with $40 billion in client assets.

Cohen has signaled that future deals are more likely to be full RIA acquisitions, which he said tend to align more directly with succession planning, while describing minority investments as “an opportunistic type of thing for us more than anything.”