Pricing Your Value®
The wealth industry has a funny relationship with the all-important matter of pricing…
Firms and their wealth professionals tolerate casual, sub-optimal pricing, year in and year out. The fact that wealth services businesses continue to make money even with compromised pricing is part of the problem.
We know of no other industry where the providers allow consistently inconsistent pricing. Pricing misaligned with the true value delivered is frankly a tax on a business, dramatically affecting the equity value and profits, as well as ability to reinvest.
We are pleased in 2025 to see a shift returning to organic growth (vs. growth through acquisitions of firms or recruitment of advisors only). Pricing correctly is far and away to best lever to pull to improve organic growth rates – better than gathering new assets, the other main lever.
But talking about pricing better and actually taking a no-shortcuts approach to correcting pricing are two vastly different things.
Pusateri has since 2007 led brokerages, private banks, trust companies, and even commercial banks to reconsider pricing. Through our Pricing Your Value Unapologetically approach, we get wealth professionals to reprice new relationships. More importantly, we get our clients to correct mispriced legacy relationships. This correcting mispriced current client relationships is the single most feared, but also far and away the lowest risk, and highest justified revenue enhancement action wealth professionals can take.
Pusateri’s client firms have tracked revenue lifts from improved return on assets through pricing changes. They have reported more than $100 million in recurring revenue shifts upward resulting from our Pricing Your Value engagements.
How do we engage with wealth firms?
- We engage with those firms with leaders who understand the importance and urgency of addressing pricing.
- The firms identify with our counsel a realistic repricing level, typically in terms of tens of millions of new revenue, or expressed as basis points shift on total assets under management.
- Firms then either engage us for a) a fixed investment or b) a profit-performance driven contract. We increasingly prefer the latter structure.
We cannot divulge our clients’ names out of confidentiality. We wish we could.
They include two of the top US “wirehouses” in the US, where even a 1 basis point shift in ROA equals $180 million in revenue lifts. RIAs and regional firms, leading trust companies have engaged us to guide through repricing as well. In Canada, we have the privilege of being involved in one of the leading five bank-owned firm’s pricing committees – where new pricing policies are set – along direct engagement through cohorts of 20 wealth advisors to lead them through a pricing reset.
Pusateri has enjoyed an 18-year strategic alliance with PriceMetrix Inc., a leading provider of business and pricing metrics to the brokerage industry in the North America.
Firms who engage us tend to make their advisors quite happy. The firms and advisors often substantially improve their revenue and equity values. In short, we cause firms and advisors to price with integrity, and stop indulging in stumbling forward with shoddy pricing that tarnishes their brands and torpedoes their profitability.