Client Data Collection Guide for Advisors Leaving a Protocol Firm
You walk out with five fields — client name, address, phone number, email address, and account title, for the clients you serviced. That is exactly what the Broker Protocol permits, and it is all you need to carry out the door. Everything else that makes a household serviceable, you rebuild at the new firm from the client's own documents and the custodian's feed — and with the right system, that rebuild is fast, clean, and largely automatic.
The first half is the five-field reference and resignation-day mechanics. The second is the part that actually decides your move: standing up two or three hundred households from a five-field list. Handled by hand, that's the bottleneck. Handled by FastTrackr, it's a matter of feeding in the documents you already have and letting the platform build the book.
Part one — the five fields, exactly
Take these literally. The Protocol is a narrow truce — take a sixth field and you've breached it and reopened the door to a lawsuit. But five is not a hardship, because the five fields are all a good rebuild needs as its seed. Everything downstream gets reconstructed legitimately at the new firm, and the volume of that reconstruction is a solved problem.
Here is each field, the form it can take, and the question people get wrong about it.
| Field | The form it can take | The question people get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Client name | Each individual you serviced; for an entity, the legal name as titled. | Whether you can bring the relationship map. You bring each name; FastTrackr rebuilds the household structure that ties them together. |
| 2. Address | Mailing address as the firm has it. | The client's contact address, nothing more. |
| 3. Phone | The client's number(s). | Contact information only; preferences rebuild later. |
| 4. Email | The client's email. | The address is permitted; the thread is not — and you don't need the thread, the client's documents carry what you'll re-collect. |
| 5. Account title | The registration in words — the title, not the number. | Title drives which forms and fields that account needs — exactly what FastTrackr uses to build the account shell. |
Compile the list clean. Don't build it by exporting a report, running a CRM query, or emailing yourself a file — those create firm records and can be treated as a Reg S-P incident. Compile the five columns by hand, carry nothing out as a file, and you're clean. That five-field sheet is all FastTrackr needs to seed the entire project on the other side.
Resignation-day mechanics
- Resign in writing, to local branch management — a written notice, not an email to a regional inbox.
- Hand the firm the list. Transparency is the price of the Protocol's protection.
- The list references account numbers — you don't keep them. You retain only the five permitted fields.
- No solicitation before you resign.
- Clients move via client-initiated ACATS. Each client who follows you authorizes the transfer.
It's same-day: resign, deliver the list, report to the new firm, then start contacting clients. From there it's a queue of client decisions and ACATS transfers — and the advisor who has every household already built and every form already populated clears that queue while everyone else is still typing.
Verify both firms — on the day, not from memory. The Protocol only protects the move if both firms are members at the time you move. Membership isn't stable. Confirm current status with the Protocol administrator, reportedly J.S. Held, in the days before you resign. If either firm is out, the five-field safe harbor doesn't apply.
Part two — turning five fields into a fully built book
The five fields are a starting point, not a limit. FastTrackr turns them into complete, serviceable households. Everything a household needs gets gathered legitimately — from the client, from the receiving custodian, from documents you're entitled to — and FastTrackr does the assembly. Here's what each element is and how the platform handles it.
| Element | How FastTrackr handles it |
|---|---|
| Registrations / titling | From the title and the client's documents, FastTrackr builds the account shell and generates the new-account paperwork pre-filled — so titling mismatches get caught before the form is sent. |
| Cost basis | Only the sending firm can correct the official record, but FastTrackr gives you a clean structured picture of every position to reconcile the incoming feed against — errors surface immediately. |
| Beneficiaries | Re-elected on paperwork FastTrackr generates pre-populated from the client's disclosure, so no estate-planning gap slips through. |
| Risk profile / IPS | Gathered through the client's AI-assisted journey and extracted from uploaded documents — the KYC reset becomes a data-extraction step, not a re-interview. |
| Held-away assets | Captured automatically from statements the client uploads; FastTrackr reads structured and unstructured documents alike. |
| Meeting history / notes | The FastTrackr bot joins the meeting, transcribes, and pulls the data into the household record — service context rebuilds from real conversations. |
| Household / entity linkages | The core of the platform: from any sheet, export, or documents, FastTrackr creates the household and links members, accounts, and entities automatically. The system starts built, not blank. |
Read that as the workload it replaces. By hand, every household means paperwork for several accounts, a beneficiary election, a risk profile, an ACATS initiation, basis verification, and the soft layer — all in a sixty-to-a-hundred-and-twenty-day window while you retain clients. With FastTrackr, you feed in the documents and the platform builds the households, populates the forms, validates them, and stages the set for signature. The legal steps don't change; the labor does.
Retention is why speed matters. Well-run transitions hold eighty-six to ninety percent of assets; poor ones shed a fifth. The household served in week one stays. When the rebuild is automated, week-one service across the whole book stops being aspirational.
Where FastTrackr fits
FastTrackr is built for exactly this moment. Upload whatever you have — a protocol sheet, a flat Excel, a brokerage statement, a driver's license, a voided check, a CRM or custodian export, even a meeting transcript — and it reads all of it, structured or not, and builds the households, members, and accounts for you. The client gets an AI-assisted journey instead of a long form.
Because FastTrackr maps every form to its account type and custodian, it populates every field, attaches every signatory, satisfies each custodian's quirks — carbon copies, SMS verification, whatever the firm requires — and pushes the full set to DocuSign in one click, hands you filled PDFs, or outputs the data in a custodian's own template. The five fields are yours to compile correctly — see Read Your Contract Before You Make a Move for the covenants that still bind around them. Everything after is FastTrackr's job.
The move is won in the rebuild
The five fields are a rolodex; FastTrackr turns them back into a book. The rebuild is the part that used to decide everything — and the part that no longer has to be slow. Build the households fast and clean, serve every client in the first week, and the gap the old firm needs to win them back never opens.
If you haven't yet confirmed what you're even allowed to take, start with Rep-Owned vs. Firm-Owned. If your covenants are the open question, Read Your Contract before your resignation date. And confirm both firms' Protocol membership the week you move — not from a list you read last quarter.
