Partnering with Cantella

Partnering with Cantella

Cantella is uniquely situated to support independent financial professionals. We were our own broker/dealer and RIA for 70+ years and worked closely with BNY Mellon | Pershing, Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions (National Financial Services) and Raymond James Custody and Clearing for over 20 years. This has given us a great deal of experience and insight that most independent branch offices do not have.  In 2022, we made the decision to become an enterprise OSJ of Cambridge Investment Research, Inc. , a decision which was not taken lightly. Our executive team has worked at Cantella, and with each for over 20 years, formally assuming leadership in 2008, and buying the firm in 2014. We were, and continue to be, very proud of what we built and still love what we do. We have long championed the independent financial professional, and strongly value a culture of independence, flexibility and choice and put a premium on relationships.  It was critical we found a partner that would ensure the preservation, longevity and integrity of our entrepreneurial culture, as well as the businesses of our nationwide network of financial professionals…We found that with Cambridge.

For over 40 years[1], Cambridge has supported independent financial professionals by providing a broad range of solutions in the areas of advice, technology, business growth, consulting and more.  We found Cambridge to be nearly identical to Cantella in terms of business model, clearing platforms (Fidelity and Pershing), and culture. However, given they are larger than Cantella they were able to bring additional scale to help us provide a wider breadth of services to our financial professionals and their clients, give us a louder voice in dealing with the regulatory landscape and changes, provide a wider pool of succession planning options, and more. It was also very important to us that they are not publicly traded nor owned by an insurance company or an equity partner.

Our financial professionals now benefit from both Cambridge’s platform and service offering, as well as the added layer of elite/high touch support and expertise provided by the Cantella team.  The combination gives our financial professionals a unique edge and ability to service their clients and build valuable, successful businesses.  We take a consultative, open-minded approach to everything from compliance to technology to products, because we believe every advisor and every client has unique needs.  We’ve always stayed true to who we are: a firm that’s big enough to provide the support and technology you need to grow, but not too big to develop personal relationships and understand your business.

Technology is in our DNA

Another major factor in our decision to join Cambridge was their dedication to superior technology.  Technology that helps financial professionals, as well as the home office team, run efficiently is, and always has been, paramount.  Our CEO, Jay Lanstein, is also our CIO and built a proprietary technology platform that we used prior to joining Cambridge.  This dashboard fully integrated with direct feeds from our clearing and custody firms, direct business carriers, and insurance carriers, providing full visibility to every aspect of your business – from account alerts to a workflow tracking system, to production information, a document archiving system, client account profiles, notes and more.  Thus, when choosing a firm to join we needed to ensure this firm could satisfactorily replace the efficient core systems we were using…Again, we found that with Cambridge. We also continue to maintain IT employees within the branch to help advisors with day-to-day issues and troubleshooting, purchasing new equipment and more.

We provide a forward thinking and relationship-driven team, dedicated to helping financial professionals build client-centric practices by providing cutting edge custom-built technology, flexible clearing and custody options with top-tier clearing providers, an unbeatable range of product and services offerings and responsive, personalized home office support.