Two former Barclays advisers with about $500 million in assets under management are joining six former colleagues at Summit Trail, a firm that was founded last month by Barclays advisers who had managed some $3 billion in assets.
In joining Summit Trail, the advisers, Daniela Pedley and Lauren Cosulich, are not moving to Stifel Financial Corp. as part of a
deal inked in June to buy the assets of Barclays' U.S. wealth management unit.
“It would have been a disservice to our clients if we hadn't considered” the Stifel deal, Ms. Cosulich said. “We did the due diligence on that, and we decided that Summit Trail was the better place for us to take care of our clients.”
Barclays had about 180 financial advisers in the U.S. managing $56 billion in total client assets as of May 31, according to a news release from Stifel. A handful, however, have gone independent or
joined large wirehouse firms such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, since the deal was announced.
As part of the deal, however, Stifel will pay for only what assets transition. A spokesman for Stifel, Brian Spellecy, did not immediately return a request for comment, but the firm's CEO, Ron Kruszewski, told investors in a recent earnings call that he remains "excited about the Barclays transaction" and for "what it does for our overall wealth platform from a competition perspective."
CONSIDERING INDEPENDENCE FOR YEARS
The duo, who are based at Summit Trail offices in San Francisco and Boston, had been considering going independent for several years, but they wanted to find a place where they would not have to be solely in charge of running day-to-day operations and also would not have to outsource their investment management, research, manager selection and asset allocation recommendations, Ms. Cosulich explained.
“One thing we never got comfortable with was the fact that so many RIAs are outsourcing their investment platform, and often that's basically because of scale,” she said. “The services that we provide for ultra-high net worth families get pretty complex and varied.”
They had also known the founder of Summit Trail, Jack Petersen, since 2006 when they worked at Lehman Brothers Inc., which later sold its wealth group to Barclays. Mr. Petersen at one point ran Barclays' wealth management operations in the U.S.
Summit Trail went independent with the assistance of Dynasty Financial Partners, which provides a platform and support services to RIAs in exchange for a fee. Thirty firms now contract with Dynasty, according to the firm's spokeswoman, Sally Cates.
