Former Goldman Sachs Execs Launch RIA Aggregator

Former Goldman Sachs and United Capital executives Mike Capelle, Jason Gordo and Gary Roth have teamed up to launch Modern Wealth Management, which received $200 million in private equity financing from Crestview Partners.

The new RIA aggregator plans to acquire RIAs across the U.S. and says it is already in several discussions with RIA firms interested in joining it. Modern Wealth will be use Charles Schwab and Fidelity as custodians.

“Advisors are being left behind as the leading edge of industry is forcing them to broaden their scope of services,” according to co-CEO Capelle, who was chief platform officer at United Capital and head of product at Goldman Sachs Personal Financial Management.

“Clients want clarity and control of their finances, and we plan for our platform to extend beyond investment management to offer customized, digital views of their financial lives, how they are progressing toward key goals and the benefit they are receiving from engaging with Modern Wealth,” Capelle added.

Modern Wealth management intends to take a “full team” approach to delivering comprehensive financial advice to clients, the firm said, noting that it will have a team of in-house specialists, such as certified financial planners, tax planners, risk managers and estate planners “to support advisors in the provision of holistic client service,” according to a statement.

“This leadership team has executed over 90 acquisitions of RIAs, building United Capital to $25 billion of AUM with over 220 financial advisors and 22,000 clients in over 70 offices when it was sold to Goldman Sachs,” explained Dan Kilpatrick, partner and head of financial services at Crestview.

‘New and Fresh’

After working on the sale of United Capital to Goldman Sachs in 2019 and staying on board for three years afterwards, co-CEO Roth said he and other asked themselves: “What are all the things that we did that we think really worked really well, [as well as] what we think we didn’t do well? Let’s create something new and fresh, from the ground up, we thought. That led us to launch Modern Wealth Management.”

Although Modern Wealth intends to make acquisitions, Roth explained, “We want to do fewer of them. We want to do them in fewer geographic areas, with a more intentional approach around building centralized, common systems and processes around client service, onboarding new clients and the entire suite of solutions [for] clients.”

Meanwhile, he added: “We’re going to put advisors in roles that they feel best suited for — [the] role that energizes them the most, whether that be introducing clients to the firm or servicing clients of the firm.”