In an industry known for the stubbornly elevated average age of advisors, Aly Kassim-Lakha is a fresh face with some new ideas about improving the business of financial advice.
In April, Kassim-Lakha, 31, founded Aspen Standard Wealth, a holding company that says it wants to be a “permanent home” for other RIAs, as opposed to the shorter ownership windows of the private equity funds fueling much of the RIA M&A activity. While many RIA support platforms and aggregators will boast similar ambitions, Aspen has received significant funding and approaches the industry from an investment banking lens.
Kassim-Lakha spent six years at the investment firm Advent International, where he focused on opportunities in wealth management and saw that the fiduciary model was ascendant and with lots of room to grow.
“I fell in love with the service model in this industry which is you are helping people with one of the most important parts of their lives and one of the parts in life that I think is quite complicated,” Kassim-Lakha said. “It’s a major source of concern, it’s a major source of uncertainty and advisors have the ability to alleviate some of that concern.”
However, while he recognized that the wealth management business had long-term growth potential, he also saw some of the issues the industry has been plagued by recently. One of these is what he calls “short-termism,” with private equity shops buying up RIAs to only hold them for three to five years, which, in his view, impedes developing a long-term strategic vision for these firms.
Another is helping RIAs achieve organic growth in an industry where attracting top talent can be challenging.
Earlier this year, with financial backing from San Francisco-based private equity firm Alpine Investors and holding company Evergreen Group, Kassim-Lakha launched Aspen Strategic Wealth.
The company’s first acquisition, announced this November, was San Francisco-based Summitry, a $2.8 billion AUM RIA.
Aspen’s own internal goal is to grow into a company with $100 billion in AUM by 2030, Kassim-Lakha said, admitting it’s an ambitious roadmap.
Aspen’s acquisition targets might range from shops with $500 million in AUM to, ambitiously, those with $10 billion, he said, but ultimately it is looking for RIA principals with a business-development orientation, a strong focus on customer service and open to help with challenges such as succession planning and achieving higher rates of organic growth.
“Those are the things where we can add a lot of value,” Kassim-Lakha said.
Kassim-Lakha also emphasizes Aspen’s decentralized model. A partnership with Aspen allows RIAs to maintain their existing brand and service delivery model while helping them outsource compliance, marketing and recruitment to someone with greater resources to handle those tasks.
While this decentralized aggregation model is not new, Kassim-Lakha said they have resources that benefit the mission. For example, he mentions that its stakeholder, Alpine Investors, is one of the biggest MBA employers in the country, which expands the possibilities for new talent acquisition.
“What we’ve been hearing from the people we’ve been speaking to is that this is a solution they didn’t think was possible—to be able to maintain their brand, to be able to maintain the promises they’ve made to their customers. That’s different, and that’s something we are really excited about bringing to market,” he said.
