Until recently, clients of Holmes Murphy & Associates had to look elsewhere if they were seeking independent financial advice for themselves or their businesses. Now, through a strategic alliance with a West Des Moines-based financial advisory firm, the insurance broker is able to offer a complete array of services in that arena.

In August 2005, Holmes Murphy began collaborating with Securian Advisors MidAmerica Inc. In May, Securian’s 14 advisers and staff of 13 support personnel moved into Holmes Murphy’s West Des Moines headquarters at 3001 Westown Parkway and began operating as Holmes Murphy Financial Services. Just months into the new operation, Holmes Murphy officials say the new division is striking a chord with clients who are seeking financial advice.

“We felt this was a way to really help round out our offering to the employer and then ultimately take it to the participants,” said Jim Pierce, executive managing director of Holmes Murphy Financial Services.

The financial services arm of Holmes Murphy has “aggressive” long-term growth plans to hire 50 additional financial advisers over the next 14 years. That growth will probably be spread among a half-dozen Midwest markets, with Omaha and St. Louis targeted as the first two cities for expansion.

Though Holmes Murphy has built its retirement services division to over $800 million in assets over the past eight years, attempts to provide financial management services were largely unsuccessful, and the company decided to search for an outside firm with a good track record, Pierce said.

After talking with a number of companies, “we felt that Securian Advisors MidAmerica and their comprehensive financial planning process was more perfectly fitted to how we wanted to approach that product, that it would be more service-based rather than product-based,” he said.

The arrangement is a strategic alliance between the companies, said Jim Mars, principal of Securian Advisors MidAmerica and now managing partner of Holmes Murphy Financial Services. Founded in 1981, Securian Advisors is an independent firm with $650 million in assets under management. It offers securities through Securian Financial Services Inc., a St. Paul-based broker-dealer.

“We intentionally didn’t look at a merger or an acquisition, at least at this point,” Mars said. “We had one very, very successful enterprise, that being Holmes Murphy, and ours was successful. We didn’t want to do anything to dilute that. We said, ‘Let’s keep those structures intact; let’s just align with one another where we can create synergies, where we can create strategic value to one another.’ In the future that may change, but today it works very well.”

Mars noted that his company’s seven other existing offices located in Iowa, Oklahoma and Arkansas will continue to operate under the Securian name, while the West Des Moines employees and any new offices will operate as Holmes Murphy Financial Services.

“We wanted to walk before we ran with this,” Pierce said. “There was a thought to a full alliance happening off the bat. But we decided, ‘Let’s make Des Moines happen.’ There is certainly the intent to bring the whole organization together.”

Currently, financial services make up only about 2 percent of Holmes Murphy & Associates’ business, Pierce said. The company, which currently ranks as the 29th largest insurance broker in the country, is on target to reach its goal of $100 million in annual revenue by the end of 2007, he said. However, Pierce said the company has not yet established firm goals for how much of its growth should come from the financial services sector.

“We expect that once our marketing initiatives mature, we will be much more capable of establishing financial guidelines for that business,” he said.

Holmes Murphy Financial Services will provide both wealth management services to higher-income individuals and business owners as well as financial planning for employees. Other services will include worksite financial education, retirement plan services, strategic business planning and investment management.

“We have tried to create expertise within all of those areas,” Mars said. “We have created the different teams that specialize in each of these areas. Holmes Murphy has always been about bringing expertise to the marketplace. While financial services can be a very broad industry, we’ve tried to break it down with our people so we can continue to bring expertise within specific areas. We’re not going to try to be a jack-of-all-trades, and thereby reduce our expertise.”

As businesses increasingly become the focal point for the delivery of financial services for their employees, the need for financial education at the corporate level will continue to increase, Pierce said. The Pension Protection Act of 2006, which President George W. Bush signed into law earlier this month, will make that service even more valuable, Pierce said. The measure removes some barriers companies previously had in providing fiduciary adviser services to their employees due to liability issues.

“Our workplace education initiative has been extremely well-embraced by our clients,” he said. “We’ve been able to bring to them better education than we’ve previously provided.”