Advisor Transition Checklist: Onboarding a Breakaway Team (Operations Guide)

Onboarding a breakaway advisor team is a three-phase operations project for the receiving RIA. In the quiet period, before the advisor resigns, ops prepares everything that does not need client data: registration, custodian setup, technology accounts, the fee schedule and billing, and agreement and account templates. On announcement day, ops turns the client list the advisor is permitted to bring into prefilled, e-signature-ready packets. In the first eight weeks, ops opens accounts, initiates ACAT transfers, fixes NIGO paperwork, reconciles what arrived against what was expected, and turns on billing and reporting. The first 30 to 60 days decide asset retention because that is when clients choose whether to follow, and every stalled packet gives them a reason to stay.

The advisor owns the relationship. Operations owns the speed and accuracy of everything the client touches after saying yes. A client who agrees to move on Monday and receives a clean packet that afternoon usually signs. A client who receives a packet on Thursday with the wrong account title, then a correction the following week, has had ten days of calls from the old firm in between. This checklist is organized around removing that gap.

Before you start: who owns what

Transitions fail at the seams between recruiting, compliance, the advisor's own team and operations. Settle ownership before the quiet period starts:

• Counsel and your CCO own the legal plan: whether the Broker Protocol applies, what the advisor may take, the timing of the resignation and the first client contact, and any restrictive covenants in the advisor's current agreement. None of this is an operations decision, and nothing in this guide is legal advice.
• Operations owns registration logistics (with compliance), custodian setup, systems, paperwork, transfers, reconciliation, billing and reporting.
• The advisor and their team own client outreach and the conversation that gets each household to say yes.
• One named transition lead in operations owns the household tracker and the daily exception list. If two people own it, nobody does.

Phase 1: the quiet period (before the advisor resigns)

During the quiet period you do not have client data, and you should not ask for it. The advisor is still employed by their current firm. What you can do is build every piece of the machine that the client data will flow into.

Know what the advisor can bring, and what they cannot

The Protocol for Broker Recruiting covers moves between firms that are both signatories. Under its text, the departing representative "may take only the following account information: client name, address, phone number, email address, and account title of the clients that they serviced while at the firm" and is prohibited from taking any other documents or information. The resignation is delivered in writing to branch management with a copy of that client information. The Protocol also says the new firm will limit use of the information to the representative soliciting their former clients, citing GLB and SEC Regulation S-P, and that a client who wants to transfer an account need only sign an ACAT form.

Three operational consequences follow. First, you will not have account numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth or holdings on day one, so your packets must be built to collect them from the client. Second, the Client Information should be stored where only the recruited advisor's team can use it, not loaded into a firm-wide marketing list. Third, the Protocol only applies when both firms are signatories. J.S. Held, the Protocol's administrator, publishes the official signatory list, and firms have joined and left over the years. Whether the Protocol applies to a given move, and what to do if it does not, is a question for counsel.

Quiet-period checklist

1. Registration. Work with compliance to stage the advisor's Form U4 and any state investment adviser representative registrations or notice filings the move requires. FINRA describes the U4 as the form regulators use to register individuals, including representatives of investment advisers. The prior firm files the Form U5 when the association ends; ask compliance to review it when it posts. Filing timing is set by counsel and your CCO, not by ops.
2. Disclosure documents. Ask compliance whether Form ADV needs updating and prepare the new advisor's Form ADV Part 2B brochure supplement so it can go out with the first packets.
3. Custodian setup. Confirm which custodian or custodians the book will land on, set up the rep or advisor codes, fee and billing arrangements, and the master account links the team will need. Collect the current versions of each custodian's account opening forms and transfer of assets forms, plus the supplements for trusts, entities, retirement accounts and beneficiary designations. Old versions are a common NIGO cause.
4. Technology accounts. Provision CRM seats, email, the e-signature account, document storage, portfolio accounting and reporting access, the meeting and note-taking tools, and phones. Test logins before announcement day, not on it.
5. CRM structure. Decide how incoming households will be created: record types, the household and account hierarchy, the advisor and service team assignments, and the transition fields that drive the tracker below. Build it in a sandbox or on a test household.
6. Fee schedule and billing. Load the advisor's agreed fee schedule into billing, decide the billing start rule (from the date assets arrive, from the first full quarter, or otherwise) and document how partial periods are handled. Clients will ask about this on the first call.
7. Agreement and packet templates. Finalize the investment advisory agreement, your new account form, the custodian applications, the transfer form and a cover letter. Build them as e-signature templates with every field mapped to a CRM field, and decide the packet variants you will need (individual, joint, IRA, trust, entity).
8. Communication plan. With compliance, draft the announcement email, the follow-up sequence, the "what happens next" explainer and the call script for questions about timing, fees and statements.
9. The tracker. Build the per-household status tracker (below) empty, with its owners and exception rules, so it is ready to fill the day the list arrives.

Phase 2: announcement day

Announcement day is when the advisor resigns and the first client conversations start. For operations it is a production run: the permitted client list becomes CRM records, and those records become packets.

1. Load the permitted client information. Create a household in the CRM for each client on the list, with name, address, phone, email and account title. Nothing more is available yet, and nothing more should be loaded.
2. Prefill what you can. Generate each household's packet from the CRM record: advisory agreement, new account paperwork, custodian application and transfer form, with the fields you have prefilled and the fields only the client can supply (account numbers at the old firm, tax ID, date of birth, beneficiaries) clearly marked. The account title matters more than it looks: FINRA Rule 11870 lets the old firm take exception to a transfer when the title does not match its records.
3. Send e-signature packets in the order the advisor calls. A packet should land within an hour of the client saying yes. Sequence sends to match the advisor's call list, not alphabetical order.
4. Send the communications. The announcement and the "what happens next" explainer, reviewed by compliance, from the advisor's new address.
5. Start the tracker. Every household is in it from the first hour, with a status and an owner.

Phase 3: weeks 1 to 8

The next eight weeks are where assets are kept or lost. The work is repetitive and high volume, and the risk is not any single step but a household quietly stalling between two of them.

Account opening and ACAT transfers

When a packet comes back signed, check it for completeness before it goes to the custodian, then submit the account opening paperwork and the transfer instruction through the custodian's own process. Transfers between broker-dealers run through ACATS under FINRA Rule 11870. The rule says the carrying firm must validate the transfer instruction, or take exception to it, within one business day, and complete the transfer within three business days after validation. Its list of exceptions includes a Social Security number or tax ID mismatch, an account title that does not match the carrying firm's records, an invalid account number, an account type mismatch, and missing or improper customer authorization. Most of those are paperwork errors your team can prevent.

Plan separately for assets that cannot move in kind, such as a prior firm's proprietary funds. Rule 11870 requires the carrying firm to give the customer written notice of the options for those assets, so expect clients to call you about letters from their old firm and give the advisor a short answer to give them.

NIGO correction

Treat every rejected form as a work item with an owner and a due date, not an email thread. Record the reason in the CRM, send a corrected packet (a RAP letter with only the pages that changed, not the whole packet again), and track how many households are in NIGO each day. If the same error repeats, fix the template, not the household.

Tracking which households have moved

The advisor will ask "who is still at the old firm?" every day. The tracker should answer that without a meeting. Split the book into households fully moved, partially moved (some accounts arrived, others pending), signed but not submitted, sent but not signed, and not yet contacted.

Reconciling assets received vs expected

When a transfer completes, compare what arrived with what the client expected and with the statement they gave you. Look for missing positions, cash instead of securities, residual balances left at the old firm and cost basis that did not come over. A household is not "moved" until this reconciliation is signed off.

Billing start, reporting and CRM hygiene

• Billing live: apply the fee schedule and the start rule you set in the quiet period. Check the first bill for every transitioned household before it runs.
• Reporting live: map accounts in portfolio accounting, set performance inception dates, and decide how history from the old firm is shown. Clients will compare the first report with their last statement.
• CRM hygiene: complete the household records with the data that came in on the paperwork (account numbers, tax IDs, beneficiaries), link accounts to households, and close out the transition fields when each household is done.

The per-household tracker

One row per household, one status per stage, a date on every status and a named owner. These are the statuses worth tracking and the conditions that should put a household on the exception list.

Failure modes and the control for each

Where automation helps, and where Caddi fits

Most of the transition is judgment work: the advisor's conversations, compliance review, the reconciliation calls. But a large share of the operations hours goes into the same four mechanical tasks repeated for every household. That is where automation earns its place, and it is what Caddi Automate is used for in a transition:

1. Packet prefill from the CRM. After the household exists in Salesforce, Wealthbox, Practifi or HubSpot, Caddi fills the advisory agreement, new account paperwork and custodian PDF forms from that record. See how to auto-fill custodian forms.
2. DocuSign sends and chases. Caddi sends the packet through DocuSign and follows up on envelopes that are still unsigned on the schedule you set.
3. Status logged to the CRM. Every send, signature and status change is written back to the household record, so the tracker updates itself and the audit trail exists without anyone keeping it.
4. A daily exception list. Each morning the ops team gets the households that tripped a flag: unsigned too long, signed but not submitted, NIGO without a correction.

Someone on your team builds this by screen-sharing the process or describing it in chat, and changes it in plain English when the packet or the custodian changes. AI builds it, verified code runs it, and any model step inside a run is scoped, logged, and reviewable. Runs happen under your team's existing permissions, and every run is logged in Govern for your CCO. On average, the first agent takes 45 minutes to build.

Where Caddi does not fit: Caddi does not connect to Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing, Altruist or any other custodian platform. It prepares the custodian's paperwork and gets it signed; submitting accounts and transfers in the custodian's portal, reading custodian rejections and releasing money movement stay with your team. It also does not decide whether the Broker Protocol applies, and it does not talk to clients.

The same machinery applies after the transition, when you repaper clients for a new agreement or custodian (see client repapering) or absorb an entire firm (see the RIA acquisition integration checklist). For the steady-state version, see client onboarding automation.

More for RIA operations leaders

• The Wealth Advisory COO's Guide to AI
• What a Director of Operations at an RIA owns
• The RIA operations tech stack, by workflow
• RIA acquisition integration checklist
• Client repapering without the NIGO

Caddi connects to the systems an RIA back office runs on: Salesforce, Wealthbox, Practifi, Orion, Black Diamond, Tamarac, Addepar, DocuSign, Jump, Zocks. See how it runs client onboarding and the operational side of RIA compliance, or the RIA operations overview.