How Edward Jones Scales Advice for High-Net-Worth Clients with Tom Lewandowski

Jack Sharry: Hello everyone, welcome to WealthTech on Deck, the weekly podcast exploring how technology is transforming financial advice. Each episode features conversations with leaders from wealth management, insurance, retirement, and fintech sharing insights on innovation and collaboration that improve outcomes for investors, advisors, and firms. With more than 250 guests and 70,000 downloads, we spotlight forward thinking professionals shaping the future of digital and human advice. Today’s episode features a discussion with Tom Lewandowski. Tom has a CFA and serves as a principal and leader of the high net worth segment at Edward Jones. Today we’re going to focus on Generations, Edward Jones’ new offering to the ultra high net worth. Tom, welcome to WealthTech on Deck. Great to have you here.

Tom Lewandowski: Jack, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, our pleasure. So Tom, I know you had the Generations Program at Edward Jones. It was initiated not long ago. I want to get a little history there on that. It’s start and evolution, et cetera. So let’s start off with your role at large and fill us in on the Generations Program and where you are in the process of rolling that program out.

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah, great. So I’ll start with my role. I’m the high net worth segment leader. That’s Jones parlance. Really, I lead a separate business that’s focused on our high net worth clients and helping our branch teams better serve the ones they have and hopefully go and get some more. And so that’s an acknowledgement. At Edward Jones, we’re a hundred plus year old firm. And over that time, to get to two and a half trillion net assets, we know that there’s a lot of high net worth clients that we serve and they have different needs. Some of them are going to be small business owners. Some of them are going to be farmers, ranchers. Some of them are going to be corporate executives. We needed to recognize the more complex needs that they had and enter me and the team that I have the delight to lead to come to the table and help bring the strategies that enable that growth to happen. So that’s the job that I get to do on a daily basis and you know, what is the old quote? Find a job you love you’ll never work a day in your life. I feel really great about that role and what we’re doing with Generations so I’m happy to go into that too.

Jack Sharry: That’s terrific. Give us a little history. I know we were chatting before, you started off as an equity analyst, you had Deloitte in your background before that, and that evolved into what you’re doing now. So take us through that trajectory of joining Jones and what you did initially and then how you wound up doing what you’re doing today.

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah. Joined Edward Jones in 2008 as an equity research analyst in financial services. So trial by fire there, going through the great financial crisis. Had seven years of time and that research sheet was fantastic. And then, I think there’s a fork in the road for every research analyst to what are you going to do? You going to continue to do that type of research, you want to get closer to the business? I chose ultimately to get closer to the business and have progressed through some corporate strategy roles, really getting closer to our branch teams and clients. And about three years ago, had the opportunity to come and take on this role. As I talked about earlier, as we were really coming to this realization that clients had differing needs and we should bring differing value to market to help meet those needs more uniquely. So that’s my journey. I’ve been in this seat for three years and I’ve been having a ball.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. So I’ve been working with Edward Jones, way back when I was at Putnam and Edward Jones was my top firm when I was the national sales manager there. So I know Jones from Tom Miltenberger days. I don’t know if you know Tom, going way back when. So I’ve been a huge fan of the firm, been out to St. Louis or Maryland Heights a bunch of times and over the years and just a great fan, love the culture, love the thinking, love the approach, et cetera. But I got to say, when I heard you were doing a high net worth thing, I go, what? That doesn’t sound like Edward Jones. So, fill us in, obviously you were in on the dawning of this effort. So talk a little bit about that. How did it come about? We’ll talk more about where you are, where you’re going. Let’s talk about the genesis story, if you will.

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah, I mean, Jack, I think you’re right. When you think about Edward Jones, maybe you don’t necessarily think about high net worth or ultra high net worth, but we serve a ton of those families today. If you think about the two and a half trillion dollars of assets under care, somewhere in the neighborhood of around 10% of those assets, we classify as high net worth. And we do that in the most conservative way, conservative definition that you can think of. It’s basically, you gotta have $5 million or more with Edward Jones. And so that number is probably larger if you consider families that have less than $5 million with us that have more than $5 million of net worth. But you knowing the firm, we have a branch network that spans the entire United States and Canada. So I think we have a client in every county. And what that means is we tend to come across wealth, whether like I talked about before, business owners, farmers and ranchers, corporate executives. They’ve been clients of ours maybe before they were wealthy. And then they have some sort of life event. Baby boomers are retiring right now to use the small, medium sized business example. They’re looking to transition their business and they want to do that with somebody who knows them, knows their family and can really help them navigate the really important choices associated with wealth. And, you know, that was really kind of the recognized need is that we had a lot of this business and we have the right to win a lot more.

Jack Sharry: One of the things I’ve observed having seen Edward Jones offices on the highways and byways, the back roads of these United States. My observation is you typically have the richest person in that county or zip code or whatever. And one of the reasons you do is the high, first of all, the advisors who, the community involvement and the high trust. It really comes down to all the studies show that your trust numbers are off the chart. And so of course the people with a lot of money want to go to a place they can trust, right?

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah, you know, trust is that gateway to the conversations that matter. You know, we can talk about, 50 basis points of excess return or alpha or pick your thing. But at the end of the day, most families want to talk about legacy and what it means for their family, their community or their employees. And those are pretty sensitive conversations. You can’t have those often in the most candid way with strangers. And so they want to have them with our advisors.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, totally get it. So talk a little about, so three years ago, you come up with the idea, take us through the next three years and then we’ll talk about what you’re doing today. So I want to break it up a little bit just to kind of get, because this is a pretty enormous thing. Cause I know Jones well, you’ve got a lot going on all over the place. And this is yet another of many very, I think very smart undertakings. So talk a little bit about that initial idea to today. We’ll get into today in a minute.

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah. If you look at the industry, I spent three years of my life focused on competitive research on behalf of the firm. What you’ll find is a lot of competitors will go to market with a separate channel. So if you’re over a certain threshold of assets, come over to our private bank or come over to our private wealth channel. And to go back to what we talked about previously, that didn’t honor the relationship that our advisors have with clients. So our first insight was we did not want to get in the way of that. We needed to supplement it in a way that was true to Edward Jones. We also know that if you’re a branch team in Picker Community, Kearney, Nebraska, you may come across a business sale three to six times in your career. I’m making numbers up there, but it’s not the thing that you do every day. So you have tax, estate, planning, investment management, business, sales support, needs that could be best supplemented by a home office and external team that could bring the best advice to the table alongside what are really talented advisors and try to get to the best outcome possible for the client. And so we took those two nuggets as our main foundation for what we wanted to bring to market. And we also knew that we wanted it to be separately branded to signal to the market this was a separate and distinct offering that they would be a part of. And that’s why we named it Generations and have separately branded it as such. So those are kind of the genesis of where we were about three years ago. And we have worked over those three years to bring that to market and officially launched in April. Actually, I think it was first week of May of this year.

Jack Sharry: Gotcha. So what, I’ve seen the office sort of photos or I know you’re setting up separate branch offices or are there places to convene? I’m not sure what that, I would love to have you explain all that. But my understanding you have a few cities now and with more to come. So talk about just the sort of the physical aspect of it and then how do advisors bring their clients there? How does that all work? Fill us in.

Tom Lewandowski: We were looking for the opportunity to take the brand choice and physically manifest it in the world through real estate. And so we have done that now in four locations, Scottsdale, Dallas, West Palm Beach, and St. Louis. I’m actually sitting in one of those offices right now. It’s two fold. The most important is it is an option for our clients to come and have an experience that would have the look and feel of what you might find with a private wealth experience, but also stays true to who we are as Edward Jones. It’s not ostentatious. It is Edward Jones’ version of private wealth. But what that means is business doesn’t always happen here. It can happen in the community where the client lives. We will go to them. It’s a place for our team members. We have a fairly big team now that helps support the Generations offering also to have some community. You know, culture is a very important thing here at Edward Jones. So bringing those team members together and having a place for them to work on a daily basis was another thing that we were going after. And so it’s an arrow in the quiver for us to hold those meetings, but not a requirement, if that makes any sense.

Jack Sharry: Yeah. So is it, I’m assuming and fill me in, I’m assuming that you have specialists, estate planning and, tax and whatever folks, are they housed there or is this a place to convene? Talk a little bit about how that plays out, at least for the physical manifestation of Generations.

Tom Lewandowski: Yep. So in most of our locations, we’re going to have team members who that’s their main office. So teams like you said are going to be made up of financial planning specialists, estate planning specialists, tax, CPAs. And what they’re doing is coming together as a team against whatever that client is facing in terms of complexity and the branch team is trying to work through to work with the branch team to get to the best answer possible. Now, what that also means is we want to make it as easy as possible to actually execute on the advice. So oftentimes that friction in the system exists on the estate side, sometimes on the tax side. How do you get those partners to work together? So we have a set of external partners that we work with specifically to not only give what we think is good guidance, but actually bridge that to the execution of that advice and guidance so that the client can go kind of A to Z as opposed to A to F.

Jack Sharry: Would those partners be attorneys and CPAs kind of thing? They’re not employees necessarily with partners. Is that what you’re talking about? Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense.

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah, so we partner with EY for tax services and we partner with a firm called Husch Blackwell for the delivery of estate services. Those are our first partners that were a part of the overall launch.

Jack Sharry: And so the advisor, whether they’re housed there or elsewhere, is an Edward Jones advisor. They’re the quarterback and then they work with the specialists that know their stuff.

Tom Lewandowski: Yes, that is exactly right. They’re an extension of the branch team and it’s an ongoing service model. So this isn’t a one and done service offering. It is something that we hope the client can not only have the relationship with the branch team, but also with the Generations team on an ongoing basis for whatever sort of complexity would crop up within their lives.

Jack Sharry: Cool. Cool. I like it. It’s different kind of model. I’ve seen lots of variations on what you’re describing, but this one sounds very Edward Jones, which is no surprise. It’s just you guys are so strong in the culture department and legacy. And it shows, I think, of the trust numbers that we talked about earlier. So here you are. You got four offices. How’s it going? We’ll talk about where it’s going next, but how’s it going in terms of settling in? Because this is pretty impressive to just go from zero to whatever to get this up and running. But where are you? And then we’ll talk in a moment about where you want to go with it.

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah, I would say that we’re right on track with what our expectations were about eight months after launch. The wind at our back, so to speak, is that we have demand out. If you have 20,000 financial advisors, they’re going to have some warm leads that would be good for this offering. And so we have funded a client development team. Their sole purpose is to go and make sure this is the right offering for those clients and then make that connection back to those Generations teams and work with our branch teams to do some of that learning to try and identify those opportunities. Because a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The advisors, they want to bring this to their clients because they see the benefit associated with it. But it may not be the right offering in all instances. And so I feel really good about where we’re at right now. But 26 is a year where we are really excited about what I would say is much greater scale within the business that hopefully leads to kind of a breakout year.

Jack Sharry: Well, that makes sense because certainly at the five million and above, and I imagine you’ve got plenty that are way above that, it’s complex. There’s a lot of stuff going on. And as it’s understood by the advisors, it’s understood by the client, and then as you and your team are getting it all together to facilitate this, it would seem that there’s some settling in, some getting used to, getting comfortable so that you can work as seamlessly and effectively as possible. It seems, but fill us in.

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah, I mean, with anything new, you’re going to figure out stuff that you didn’t expect. Everyone’s got a plan until you actually face the reality of getting that into market. And so we’ve had the opportunity to learn from how do you bring a branch team and a set of home office professionals to the table as one cohesive team? Even simple things is how do you do scheduling? These are ah-has for us that we are working through such that the team come together in a coordinated fashion. So I don’t want to, you know, I think too often business leaders are like, it’s all rainbows and sunshine. That’s not the case with things that are new. It will not be that way. And you should expect some of that, but the real challenge that I think we’ve accepted is that we’re going to continuously improve it and hopefully evolve it to a place where it can be delivered to more clients and more branch teams because we’ve learned from not only the successes but some of the mistakes.

Jack Sharry: So I’ve been through a similar process myself within the past year or so, and I’d never really done a planning process. I’d never really been, pulled it all together, but I’m at a stage of life where I’m looking out to the next chapter and trying to figure what that should look like. I consolidate at one firm just because I know better that you’re just better off if you do. That’s just my, having been around long enough to understand that. But I also know that if you have all the information, you could do better on issues around tax, you could do better around issues around just planning and coordination and estate planning, et cetera, et cetera. So I think no one can argue that. But just having been through the experience and then I’d love to have you chat about this, it’s complicated and there’s a lot of information and it really, there’s a lot of effort, especially in the beginning of pulling it all together because, well, you may have some $5 million clients, that isn’t all they got. They got it elsewhere and like, it will make sense, would imagine over time as you’re developing your capabilities that it makes sense to pull it together. So talk about that process. Is that what you’re finding in terms of you’re pulling things together?

Tom Lewandowski: Yeah, I think anything with planning, the way that we talk about it, that analogy is that you have to have a willing dance partner. And in this case, that dance is going to be work. And you have to really prep the client for that work. And that’s the beauty of having that trusted partner in the financial advisor or the branch team at the table. Because if you’re gonna go through exactly what you talked about, Jack, you gotta get your estate in order. You need to review your taxes. You need to make some choices about what’s most important for you and your family. How do you wanna use the money? We talk about the needs, wants, and wishes, but for most of our high net worth families, their needs, wants, and wishes relative to their means necessitates a conversation of the purpose associated with their money. And so to get into that conversation, which often is sensitive when you’re going to talk about passing dollars on to family members or transitioning to business, you need to be at the table and have the willingness to do it. And what we try and do is create the most comfortable environment to come and have that conversation and do that really important work. Because what people don’t realize is they carry that burden around with them, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, of am I prepared or am I not? And I think through generations, and then more just writ large of what we do at Edward Jones in our evolution towards financial planning is trying to have more people benefit from that experience to remove that burden and actually turning it into a really great experience. So for the family, you know the… often as a part of the matriarch and patriarch, sometimes it’s about the whole family. We want to involve anyone and everyone that they want at that table.

Jack Sharry: Very smart, from what I’m hearing. So where do you want to go with this thing? It sounds like you’re off to a great start and you’ve got things lining up that will only get better as you exercise what it is you’re setting out to do. Where would you like to see this go over the next one, three, five years? What’s coming?

Tom Lewandowski: From a Generation’s perspective, we know that when you’re going to roll out something new, the most important thing was to try and maintain that quality bar. So we have purposely kind of closed down the availability of the program. So it’s, in its current state only available to clients with $10 million or more of investable assets. I see the future of expanding that more broadly to that $5 million and more clientele. And that can take different forms. I talked about Generations as like an ongoing offering. For many clients, it might be just they need kind of an open and close financial plan. And if they executed that, they’d be in great shape. And then the last and I think more interesting aspect of this is we are as a firm evolving in many different ways and you touched on that. One of those is that we recognize that some of our financial advisors, they want to specialize in the high net worth space. And so Generations, yes, is supported by this home office teams and it can look at it as a separate business. But at the end of the day, it’s an offering. And we want to be able to equip our financial advisors to do more of that offering if they have the proper training, support, et cetera, in place. And so I envision a future where we are expanding the availability of delivery of the offering, bringing on new partners, adding new products and services that hopefully position us really, really well, not only to win with the demand that’s already in place, but to extend that out and deliver that Edward Jones specific experience through Generations that we feel really great to stand behind because I do feel like it is different in our ability to engage with that family in a different way than perhaps some of our competitors.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, that sounds really great. So we’ve covered a lot. I’ve been following it in the, at least in the industry news. This is even better than I expected. So congratulations to you and the team. It’s really smart, super smart. So I guess an all encompassing question, what, anything else you want to expand on about the current state, future state, before we bring our discussion to a close?

Tom Lewandowski: Jack, I just want to say thanks again for the opportunity to come on and have the conversation to begin with. I love telling the Edward Jones story. I love telling the story about what we’re up to in high net worth. Not to bang the drum, but I will. We believe strongly that those family conversations are most important. If this is something that is, if you’re listening to this and you want to remove that burden or turn it into something positive in terms of how that comprehensive plan can impact your family, we’d love you to consider an Edward Jones financial advisor because we believe that we’re the best in the business of driving those. So…

Jack Sharry: Love it. Love it. Well done. Good for you. I imagine we have a few advisors that listen. I imagine you might be interested in talking to them if they find your offering attractive as well. But I’ll leave it at that.

Tom Lewandowski: Yes, 100%.

Jack Sharry: So Tom, this has been great. As we look to wrap up, any key takeaways you want to share with our audience?

Tom Lewandowski: I hope that you got a better idea of what we’re doing in the high net worth space at Edward Jones and how we make that really Edward Jones true to who we are as a firm and that we’re here to really win in this space. What I believe based off of our research, but actually what we hear from our clients and our branch teams is if you can marry the best of both worlds, great advice, solid products and services into a comprehensive financial planning conversation, that’s what clients are really looking for at the end of the day. And so if I had a key takeaway, I hope it’s that for folks who’ve decided to click that podcast and give a listen.

Jack Sharry: That’s wonderful. Love it. So one last question, always my favorite, not having to do with much of what we’ve talked about, perhaps we’ll see. What do you do outside of work that you’re excited or passionate about that people might find interesting or surprising?

Tom Lewandowski: What a great question, Jack. I am a father of three. I’ve got two girls, 12 and 10, Elise and Nora. I’ve got a son, five. He actually just turned six, Luke. So I chase them around a lot. I think the interesting part about that, also, I’m moving into the logistical portion of my life where I take them to places. That’s what I do a lot of. But the interesting and passionate part about that is, my wife and I, two of our children have dealt with food allergies early in their lives. And so my wife specifically, Cassie has been an amazing advocate and help to a lot of families who are going through something similar. And we are very passionate about that topic and anything that we can do to help that community will be something that we focus on through the remainder of our philanthropic life and just trying to make an impact there because it’s a hard thing to go through. Everyone’s going through something, Jack, you know that. And this is one thing that families go through and if we can be any help in that, that’s something we’re going to focus on.

Jack Sharry: Good for you. No surprise that you would do that as a upstanding citizen of the Edward Jones world. So thanks for sharing that. I love it. So Tom, appreciate this conversation. I learned a lot. Thank you. Always fun to see how firms are smart about where they’re headed. So you guys are all that for sure. Just so many things going on. We’ve had so many guests from Edward Jones. Just lots of smart stuff. For our audience, thanks for tuning in today. If you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we’re doing here at WealthTech on Deck. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check us out at our dedicated website, wealthtechondeck.com. All our episodes are there along with blogs and curated content from the many folks that we have on our podcasts and elsewhere. Tom, thanks again. Really a pleasure. Really enjoyed our conversation.

Tom Lewandowski: Enjoyed it too, Jack. Thanks so much for letting me come on.

Jack Sharry: Very good, thanks.