22 who will transform wealth management in 2022

December 28, 2021 1:30 PM

A select group of financial advisors, executives and entrepreneurs stand ready to break records and drive change in wealth management in the new year.

As wealth managers draw new infusions of capital from an expanding group of investors while breaking records for M&A volume and deal size, the staff at Financial Planning set out to identify the veteran professionals and up-and-comers who could make the biggest impact on the industry in 2022. With inclusion on a prior year’s list the only disqualifying factor, the professionals making up this admittedly subjective roster are reshaping a fragmented industry and serve a mission that extends beyond annual earnings.

We encourage you to review our picks from last year with the benefit of hindsight. Now scroll down to see who made the list for 2022.

Dana Wilson, founder, Changing How Individuals Prosper (CHIP)

A referral network for Black and Latino financial professionals that Wilson launched in 2019,

CHIP

has attracted hundreds of clients and advisors, accountants, estate attorneys and other experts. This fall, Wilson appointed the organization’s

first professional advisory board

ahead of CHIP’s expansion into the real estate and mortgage fields and announced several upcoming partnerships. The coming year will reveal the next phase of the referral network’s growth and which wealth managers are teaming with the network in an industry that has historically excluded Black and Latino professionals and clients.

Keith Beverly, founder, Grid 202 Partners

The founder of Washington, D.C.-based RIA Grid 202 Partners is

working on many fronts

to boost Black representation among planners and clients while developing new methods of racial equity investing. Beverly speaks publicly against industry practices that hinder those missions. He helps train aspiring planners seeking their CFP certifications, sits on the board of North Carolina A&T State University’s Department of Family and Consumer Services and serves on the steering committee of the nonprofit Croatan Institute’s Racial Equity, Economics, Finance and Sustainability program. Beverly has criticized policies such as custodian referral programs with assets under management requirements that exclude smaller RIAs.

Kamila Elliott, chair-elect, CFP Board

The 2021 chair-elect of the CFP Board will become

the first African American woman

to lead the certifying organization for the industry’s most respected designation and its youngest chair when she takes over the role next year. She joined Grid 202 Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based RIA, as the firm’s president after two decades in the industry with Vanguard and Dimensional Fund Advisors. In addition, Elliott serves on the board of the Investment Committee for Women Against Abuse and works in the IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. The more than 90,000 CFPs across the industry subject to the board’s guidelines and oversight will be interested to see how Elliott approaches the role in 2022.

Michelle Wong, founder, Nifty Advisor Support and John Eing, partner, Abacus Wealth Partners

After a mass shooting in Atlanta and thousands of racial slurs and violent attacks targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during the COVID-19 pandemic, the fintech entrepreneur and financial advisor

created a space for essential discussion

and support through the Financial Planning Association. The Asian American and Pacific Islander Knowledge Circle provides a network for professionals to share best practices, identify partnership opportunities across the industry and lead educational efforts to boost engagement with a historically excluded group. After its inaugural meetings this year and going into 2022, the FPA group aims to offer Asian American planners a forum that recognizes their contributions to the industry and contributes to their feeling at home in wealth management, even in a season of hate.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler

From the moment he

took the reins as head of the SEC

in April, Gary Gensler seemed poised to bring big changes to the industry in terms of fiduciary reform and regulatory oversight.

Seen by many having an adversarial stance toward Wall Street, in sharp contrast

to SEC leadership during the Trump administration, Gensler has what’s come to be known to his critics as an

“everything crackdown”

perspective. In remarks

made at a November 2021

SEC summit, Gensler made clear his desire to bring greater scrutiny to the industry, indicating that he has directed SEC staff to consider regulatory changes regarding crypto, private fund fees and expenses, side letters, performance metrics, fiduciary duty, conflicts of interest and more. His agenda is

considered one of the most ambitious

in SEC history with nearly 50 proposals in the works that are already drawing opposition from hedge funds, stock exchanges, online brokers and public companies.

Chloé Moore, founder, Financial Staples; Shawn Tydlaska, founder, Ballast Point Financial Planning; Luis Rosa, founder, Build a Better Financial Future

Luis Rosa_Chloe Moore_Shawn Tydlaska copy.jpg

Earlier this year, alongside co-founder

and 2021 honoree

Emlen Miles-Mattingly, these three advisors started

BLatinX Internsh

ip, a career entry path into fee-only planning. After

the first summer of the program

, which paired aspiring Black and Latino planners with RIAs across the country, more than half of the initial cohort of 38 interns have already found full-time jobs in the profession. In 2022, the enterprise is aiming to place 100 interns in paid summer positions.

Victor Orozco, managing partner, Bair Financial Planning

Victor Orozco’s influence extends beyond his practice, co-led by founder Marci Bair, and run through the complicated lenses of ESG criteria. As a member of the investment strategy committee of the LPL Financial-affiliated practice’s office of supervisory jurisdiction, the Wealth Consulting Group, Orozco has taken a lead role in aligning client portfolios with socially responsible goals across the enterprise of more than 100 advisors and $4 billion in assets. In addition, he has taken a leadership role as a member of the U.S. SIF Foundation in providing

guides

for advisors to implement sustainable investing into their practices. As trillions of dollars in assets move into funds that use ESG criteria each year, many of Orozco’s peers and the wealth managers who work with them will rely on his expertise in making sense of

the complicated questions

facing an increasingly important aspect of investing.

John Wise, co-founder and CEO of InvestCloud

Arguably no other company in wealthtech had as big a year as John Wise’s InvestCloud.

A recapitalization deal

in February merged the fintech startup with Tegra 118, formerly Fiserv’s wealth management business, and Finantix, a global private bank. InvestCloud then

acquired financial planning software

company Advicent in May. InvestCloud now rivals Envestnet both in terms of capabilities as a provider of outsourced fintech and in terms of assets under management. With the

announcement of InvestCloud X

, Wise’s vision for how to provide the much sought-after integrated tech stack for advisors was complete. Not only could the company make a lot of noise signing on large firms as clients, but Wise is also reportedly

looking to take the company public

with an IPO that could value InvestCloud at $8 billion to $10 billion.

Lori Hardwick, chair of Vestwell

Lori Hardwick surely had one of the busiest 2021s in the industry. One of the co-founders of Envestnet, the wealthtech veteran is CEO of consulting firm RedRock Strategic Partners and sits on the boards of Cetera, Orion Advisor Solutions and Genstar Capital — the private equity firm that counts both Cetera and Orion in its portfolio. After

stepping down as chair of Riskalyze’s board in July

, Hardwick quickly

found a new role as chair of the board at Vestwell

, a digital recordkeeping company. Part of her vision is to help expand beyond retirement into other workplace savings programs and Vestwell

has already acquired Sumday

, a college savings administrator, from BNY Mellon. Now branded as Vestwell State Savings, the business is powering state-sponsored college savings in Oregon, Connecticut and Maryland. With Hardwick leading the charge, expect Vestwell to continue its rapid growth in 2022.

Lenny Chang, co-founder and head of M&A, Focus Financial Partners

In tandem with fellow Focus co-founders CEO Rudy Adolf and Chief Operating Officer Rajini Kodialam, Chang has built a firm that started at zero client assets 15 years ago and is closing 2021 with about $350 billion across 82 partner RIAs and 4,800 advisors and employees. In the past year, the firm has matched its largest number of new partner firms in any year at 11 and more than doubled its annual average with eight non-U.S. RIAs as part of a haul of 34 deals announced or completed,

according

to the firm’s investors day presentation. As a publicly traded firm that’s fueling the industry’s record consolidation, Focus acts as a standard bearer of the RIA movement with the ambitious goal of reaching 125 partners and $4 billion in annual revenue by 2025.

Jeff Dekko, CEO of Wealth Enhancement Group

This has been a year of deal-making and massive growth for the Greater Minneapolis-based independent wealth management firm led by Jeff Dekko. As CEO of Wealth Enhancement Group, he has

led the company to $55.5 billion

in client brokerage, advisory and trust assets by year’s end. The firm has emerged in recent years as one of the most active and fastest-growing RIA consolidators, closing a total of 17 deals in 2021 under Dekko’s direction. A private equity recapitalization also

gave the company a multibillion dollar valuation

. A PE fund affiliated with Onex Corporation paid $226 million for “economic ownership” of 11% of Wealth Enhancement Group. With Onex joining TA Associates as equal capital partners in WEG, the company’s equity was valued at $2.05 billion.

Shannon Eusey, CEO of Beacon Pointe Advisors

The California-based firm led by CEO Shannon Eusey has been among the most active deal-makers in 2021. In November, KKR

announced that it was buying a stake in Beacon Pointe

, the parent company of RIA consolidator Beacon Pointe Advisors. Beacon Pointe will retain more than 50% control while its prior PE backer, Abry Partners, helped double the company’s assets under management. The recapitalization gave Beacon Pointe Advisors a valuation of at least $1 billion, and Eusey’s firm closed out 2021 by making its

ninth acquisition of the year

on its home turf of Newport Beach, pushing its total assets under advisement past $20 billion. Beacon Pointe has emerged as one of the most active consolidators in the industry this year behind firms like Focus, Wealth Enhancement Group and Mercer Advisors.

Marty Bicknell, CEO of Mariner Wealth Advisors

After closing one of the 12 acquisitions made in 2021— the largest in company history —

Marty Bicknell shared his vision

of Mariner Wealth Advisors becoming one of the largest RIAs in the nation. There will be a handful of firms that will be able to go “head-to-head” with wirehouses, and there is no reason the Kansas-based firm can’t be one one of them, he said. Along with helping Mariner add more than $15 billion in assets under advisement with a flurry of acquisitions that kicked off in the summer, Bicknell marched toward his vision as the firm got its

first private equity infusion

when Leonard Green & Partners purchased a minority stake. The firm’s acquisition targets in the past have ranged from $300 million to $2 billion in assets under management, and the deal allows Mariner to consider even larger deals.

Peter Mallouk, CEO of Creative Planning

Creative Planning has been leading the RIA movement for years as one of the biggest and fastest-growing firms. In 2021, the Overland Park, Kansas-based firm’s expansion went into overdrive. Creative Planning

topped

$100 billion in assets under management in November and

struck

a deal a week later with the world’s largest insurance brokerage, Lockton, to acquire its retirement business spanning $110 billion in 401(k) assets. After receiving its

first outside infusion

of capital in 2020 with a minority investment from private equity firm General Atlantic, the company is set to surpass its own records in 2022 with more deals and more clients and advisors embracing RIAs under Mallouk’s leadership .

Kristin Kimmell, executive vice president of recruiting and revenue acquisition for Advisor Group

In summer 2021, Advisor Group brought in Kristin Kimmell to lead its financial advisor outreach efforts, ending her more than two-decade run with RBC Wealth Management. Kimmell joined the wealth manager with more than 10,000 registered representatives as the top advisor recruiter.

When discussing her approach to the role

, Kimmell said she’s “passionate about listening to advisors” when it comes to the firm’s culture, platform and technology. Kimmell's appointment is also part of Advisor Group's strategy to attract reps across all affiliations using new technology. Kimmell will help Advisor Group move outside the independent channel and attract talent from ensemble and enterprise firms, bank advisors, wirehouse breakaways and hybrids. Kimmell also manages the company's third-party recruiters with the goal of deepening engagement with existing recruiters and forming new relationships.

Vinay Nair, CEO of TIFIN Group

Until 2021, Vinay Nair’s fintech company, the TIFIN Group, was best known for selling tax automation software 55ip to J.P. Morgan Asset Management. The company spent the last year making acquisitions, landing $22.3 million in funding (bringing its total to $49.7 million) and bringing star ETF manager Cathie Wood, head of Ark Investment Management,

onto its board

. The company

aims to break into the crowded wealthtech space

by using its technology ecosystem as an improved product distribution channel for asset managers. With backing from big names like J.P. Morgan and Morningstar, Nair and TIFIN are worth keeping an eye on.

Kabir Sethi, head of digital at Merrill Lynch

After about a decade of lagging behind the technology enjoyed by independent financial advisors, the banks and wirehouses have used their resources to catch up and, in some cases, leap ahead. Few were as active as Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2021. Under Kabir Sethi, the firm launched

a new advisor workstation

,

fully digital account opening

and a

new mobile app for advisors

. Some of its innovations won

awards from industry analysts

. But Sethi has more planned for 2022, including voice command functionality for advisors, that this year’s updates are paving the way for.

Martin M. Shenkman, estate planning lawyer in Fort Lee, New Jersey

Martin Shenkman is one of the most highly regarded strategic planners for ultra wealthy investors, family offices and closely held businesses. He also holds credentials as a certified public accountant, personal financial specialist and accredited estate planner. Known for his creative tax strategies, including the use of spousal access lifetime trusts to preserve an entire SALT deduction and structuring trusts so they can be unwound if tax laws change, Shenkman has written dozens of books on estate planning, tax and investing. His nonprofit, ChronicIllnessPlanning.org, offers free advice to planners on advising clients who are living with a chronic illness or disability, such as Alzheimer’s.

Laura Zwicker chair, Greenberg Glusker's Private Client Services Group

A lawyer by training, Zwicker advises individuals and families on international and domestic tax and estate planning issues and business succession planning. She blends legal, tax and wealth management advice into a digestible mix for high net worth individuals and their families. She also counsels nonprofits and financial institutions on fiduciary and custodial issues.