Caitlin Douglas, a new founding partner and chief operating officer for investment firm Elevation Point, knows the industry’s next few years will be defined by advisors requiring “different flavors of independence.” She’s confident her firm has found a flavor that’ll be particularly appealing.
“You have (on one side) your platforms which are service providers, and then on the other side, you have your aggregators, which are looking to you to give over full control,” she said. “In the middle is where you have Elevation Point. We don’t want you to give up full control.”
Douglas joined Elevation Point in September from her previous job as managing director of transition services and co-head of service at Dynasty Financial Partners, where she stayed for six years.
Before that, she was director of client services at the Columbia, Md.-based RIA Keeney Financial Group (which was bought by Beacon Pointe). At Elevation Point, she’ll lead the firm’s operations and service organizations.
Sanctuary Wealth founder and former CEO Jim Dickson launched Elevation Point in June with co-founder Mark Penske, the founder and chairman of financial services holding company United Atlantic Capital.
The firm will take minority stakes in RIAs with assets ranging from $200 million to $3 billion and contribute resources to help them grow. At the firm’s launch, Elevation Point acquired the $3.4 billion RIA Mount Yale Capital Group, which would establish middle- and back-office business functions for incoming advisors.
In addition to Douglas, Elevation Point brought on former UBS executives Bradford Smithy and Robert B. Tamarkin as founding partners, former Summit executive Jenna Bloombgarden as head of marketing and advisor experience, and former BNY Pershing executive Brian Terraciano as head of operations.
Douglas said the firm will add someone in-house to offer high-end estate and tax planning services for firms early next year; the firm intends to onboard at least one to two teams per month over the coming year.
According to Douglas, firms seeking independence have far more choices than they did 10 years ago. She recalled her time at Keeney Financial, when the LPL-affiliated firm started exploring opportunities to go independent. She remembered it took her and the firm’s president years to do their full due diligence and understand the indie landscape.
“But what it really came down to is that you owned your own RIA, and that’s it. If you wanted to go into a corporate ADV, it was usually like you were going onto a corporate ADV at LPL or something like that, not the choice that you have now where you can be with Elevation Point,” she said. “I mean, the options have just exponentially grown.”
Technology is accelerating the pace of change. According to Douglas, only five years ago, paper transitions of clients’ accounts to new businesses were the norm. Now, firms are digitally onboarding clients, reducing transitions that could have lasted months or weeks to ever-shorter time spans, depending on the custodian.
“Instead of it taking weeks for complex accounts and entities to be set up, it’s more like you’re looking at days … if not a day,” she said. “And we’re already starting to see that in some respects.”
