Derek Bruton was placed at LPL Financial by DAK in August of 2007 as Executive Vice President and Chief Executive of the affiliated broker-dealers. In March of 2009, Derek was named National Sales Manager for the LPL Financial Independent Advisor Services business. While retaining his CEO position, Derek is now responsible for business development for the Independent Advisor Services business group: ensuring that training, relationship management, business consulting, and succession planning aim to best serve and support advisors. Derek will also focus on driving advisor satisfaction; serving as a key advocate for advisor needs, and supporting their business growth, according to a statement from LPL Financial in March of this year.

DAK placed Gary Jones with the Money Management Institute as the Vice President of Industry Operations in May of 2006. Since then, Gary’s success has been highly measurable. In September of 2007, Gary was named “Operations Leader of the Year” by Operations Management magazine. More recently, Gary was awarded the SMA Player of the Year Award at the Mutual Fund Industry 16th Annual Awards in March of 2009 for his key role in the communication standards initiative for the separately managed accounts industry. The employment of an industry-wide communication standard in the SMA industry holds many potential benefits; including increasing ease of information transfer, business transactions with other platforms, and business growth. The communication standard spearheaded by Gary Jones is already in play at firms in the industry, Smith Barney and UBS among them, and is expected to be adopted by all SMA providers within the next ten years.