Providers
The question is not whether you can. It is whether the reason is good, because the costs are real and mostly invisible until you are already carrying them.
Yes, and a meaningful number of firms do. The question is whether the reason is good, because the costs are real and they are mostly invisible until you are already carrying them.
A capability one provider genuinely lacks. A specialist mandate, a tax approach, an asset class handled properly in one place and adequately in the other.
Concentration risk you have actually thought about. If a single provider failing would be an existential event for your firm, that is a legitimate reason to diversify — provided you have worked out what "failing" means and what you would do.
A transition in progress. Running two while you move from one is not duplication, it is sequencing.
Keeping a provider honest. Understandable, and expensive. Competitive tension is better applied at renewal than maintained through permanent duplication.
Inherited from an acquisition, never resolved. Extremely common. Nobody chose this; it simply never got decided.
Advisor preference within the firm. Two advisors who each like their own provider is not a strategy, it is an unresolved disagreement carried on the operations budget.
Two sets of reporting that will not reconcile. Two billing processes. Two operational contacts, two service standards, two escalation paths. Staff who have to know both. And the answer to "why does this client's report look different" becoming a recurring conversation.
The cost is rarely the fees. It is that every operational task now has two versions.
Write down which clients go where and why. An undocumented rule becomes an advisor-by-advisor habit, and habits are what examiners ask about when they see two providers and no policy.
Running the comparison properly →
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
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