Aspen Standard Wealth, a holding company that acquires wealth management platforms, has taken a majority stake in Summitry, a San Francisco-based registered investment advisor with $2.8 billion in assets under management. This represents Aspen’s first acquisition since it launched in April.
Backed by private equity firm Alpine Investors, Aspen was created by CEO Aly Kassim-Lakha, a former investor at Advent International. Kassim-Lakha has been building a team of 15 people that will support the firm’s RIA partners.
“It was what I saw while I was at Advent that opened my eyes to some of the opportunities and pain points in the industry,” he said. “We then set out to build Aspen to solve a lot of those issues.”
One of those pain points he witnessed was a lack of long-term partners to advisory firms.
“We’re meant to be a permanent home,” he said. “Other investors in the space have mandates to sell every three to five years. We have a long-term orientation because we think that’s in the best service of the customer, first and foremost, the advisors and then the businesses in the industry.”
The firm is named after the Aspen tree, which, Kassim-Lakha says, are entirely connected underground, with intertwined roots.
“They’re the oldest living organism on the planet because they’re so powerfully connected below what’s visible,” he said. “That’s the model that’s quite comparable to how we want to build the business.”
Aspen will take a majority stake in the RIAs that choose to join, and those firms maintain their brand, culture and ADVs.
“The customer has signed up to be with the business. The service delivery is local,” he said. “To switch that on them, we felt, went counter to the initial promise that was made to the customer.”
The firm will handle all the back-office and compliance functions, so that the owners can focus on organic growth.
Aspen also has a dedicated team that will help wealth management firms solve some of the talent issues they may have. The firm will source talent on behalf of the RIAs, whether that’s operating, HR and finance staff. They’ll screen candidates, conduct all the interviews with them, and then bring them to the owners for the final decision.
They will also partner with owners to help with direct marketing and channel partnerships.
Every deal is structured differently, but most of them will involve some ownership in Aspen.
While the firm is targeting RIAs with between $300 million to $10 billion in total assets, Kassim-Lakha said it’s more important that the firm be growth-minded.
“Summitry embodies everything we seek in a partner: growth oriented, client obsessed, and people focused,” he said, in a statement. “Aspen offers what successful, leading RIAs like Summitry have long been looking for: a deeply knowledgeable, permanent partner who is there to support them indefinitely. We are the sorely needed alternative to traditional investment firms in that we enable our partners to thrive long term.”
