A father who’s a former craft beer brewer and his son, an ex-USA Rugby player, left the wirehouse scrum for LPL Financial’s largest corporate RIA enterprise.
Financial advisors Bruce and Duncan Kelm of Santa Rosa, California-based ArrowPoint Wealth Management dropped Morgan Stanley to affiliate with LPL and Gladstone Financial Resources Group, the firm said May 26. The office of supervisory jurisdiction spans 670 advisors with more than $24 billion in client assets under a merger
The Kelms’ practice — which manages $135 million in client assets — is Gladstone’s first in Northern California. They left the wirehouse on May 21, according to FINRA BrokerCheck, affiliating with LPL after the firm
LPL “has demonstrated every day that they are a righteous partner, so focused on the advisor experience,” Bruce Kelm said in a statement. “We know LPL is a partner with whom we can walk down the road for the long haul.”
Representatives for Morgan Stanley declined to comment on the father-son team’s departure.
The elder Kelm ran a brewery in the 80s before launching his financial services career with Merrill Lynch in 1992. He spent 16 years with Merrill and 10 with Morgan, starting in 2009. He traces the roots of the practice to his relationships with other small business owners.
His son, a prop and hooker, made the USA Collegiate Fifteen All-American team at San Diego State University. He later played with the USA Sevens, appearing in four World Rugby Seven Series events in 2011 and 2012. Duncan Kelm joined Morgan Stanley in 2017, carving out a specialty in serving business owners and other professionals.
They’ll be using LPL’s corporate RIA rather than Gladstone’s hybrid RIA. Those are two of the four affiliation options with Chester, New Jersey-based Gladstone after its merger with the Charlotte, North Carolina-based Financial Resources Group.
The merged enterprise — which generates as much annual revenue as a midsize independent broker-dealer at about $150 million — also includes bank and credit union-based teams and those with part of their book from financial institutions and part outside of them.
“We picked up all the services that we would have had to build out to support our growing firm,” says Gladstone CEO Rick Frick. “For how large we are, it was a great opportunity for us.”
