Where $50 billion AUM isn't a whale
Randy Bullard, Global Head of Wealth at Charles River Development, thinks RIA aggregators and rollups could become fierce competition for wirehouses and TAMPs.
Programming note: I was on vacation with my family in Arizona last week for the beginning of MLB spring training. I’ll be back at it this week.
“This is new,” Randy Bullard, the Global Head of Wealth at Charles River Development, told me on a call two Fridays ago.
Randy has been around the taxable wealth industry for a long time. In 1999, he co-founded and was CEO of Placemark, which developed unified managed account programs for banks, full-service broker-dealers, and RIAs, and was acquired by Envestnet Inc. for $66 million in 2014.
“Tax is unarguable value,” Bullard said. In the past five years, he argued that there’s been a return to advice fundamentals like risk and, especially, tax management.
He might have just been humoring me. Many know I’m a tax nerd and put my kids to sleep every night by reading passages from IRS Publication 550.
Randy’s clients include some of the largest RIA rollups and aggregators in the United States. A $50 billion AUM adviser, or aggregator, client isn’t a whale. So, when he mentioned that “tax transitions are a top three item for enterprise wealth managers seeking organic scale,” of course, that caught my attention.
This insight comes from answering questions in the largest RFPs in the marketplace. The infrastructure, tooling, and user interface to seamlessly transition new client assets is always a top feature request.
“Tax transitions become part of the 5-6 step playbook to win new business, it’s that simple,” Bullard said. If tax-aware transitions have reached the largest (and probably slowest-moving) players, it’s fair to say it is table stakes.
But there’s a backstory worth unpacking.