Elevation Point Snags Dynasty Exec as New COO


Elevation Point, an investment firm launched in June by former Sanctuary Wealth CEO Jim Dickson has hired Caitlin Douglas, former managing director of transition services and co-head of service at Dynasty Financial Partners, as its chief operating officer.

“As we were getting ready to launch and start the transition teams, and invest in the teams, it was really important for us to have a COO who could really do that at a high level and build a team at a level of high,” Dickson said.

Douglas has nearly 20 years of experience in the wealth management industry. She spent the last six years at Dynasty, where she transitioned countless breakaway advisors as well as M&A mergers into existing partner firms. Before that, she was director of client services at Keeney Financial Group in Columbia, Md., an RIA that was acquired by Beacon Pointe earlier this year.

The Elevation Point role represents the next phase in Douglas' career, she said. She will lead the firm's operations and service organization.

“I definitely have the track record of transitioning teams, but I think my greatest value will really be in that COO role,” she said. “What I'm most excited about is the opportunity to not only take the lessons of transitioning teams and building a customer service model, but also being able to build these RIAs from the ground up, over time. And that's really every part of the business, everything from compliance to investments to real estate. You name it; I had my hands in it.”

Douglas said she will build the team over the next few months and conduct research into the technology systems the firm will use, with an emphasis on full integration.

Dixon announced launch of Elevation Point in June. The firm will take minority stakes in RIAs with $200 million to $3 billion in client assets and contribute resources to help these firms grow. He partnered with Mark Penske, founder and chairman of United Atlantic Capital, a privately held financial services company, on the new venture.

In conjunction with the launch, the firm acquired Mount Yale Capital Group, an RIA and subcontracted chief investment officer with $3.4 billion in assets under management, to provide middle and back-end business functions to support advisors.

Since then, Dixon has built his team. In July, he added Bradford Smithy and Robert B. Tamarkinformer UBS executives as founding partners. They serve on the executive committee and focus on partnership development and Elevation's growth and expansion efforts. This will include working to identify partnership opportunities, helping to define the overall strategic vision for Elevation Point and talent acquisition.

The firm also hired Ryanne Gardner, a former Pershing executive at BNY, as head of partner integration.

In August, Naomi Stein joined from Corient as platform director.

Recently, Kelly Berenbaum, founder and principal planner at Blue Tree Financial, came on board as director of customer experience.

Dickson said the pipeline of potential RIA partners is “overwhelming.” He expects to close several deals in the fourth quarter and see even more activity in the first quarter of 2025 as Elevation Point launches its spin-off business.

Elevation Point was launched through a round of funding oversubscribed by a combination of family office investors and some debt capital.

Another industry publication recently reported that the firm was pursuing a sale of a minority stake, but Dickson said they are not looking to sell any part of the firm, but only to engage in a normal process of vetting corporate financing options. . In fact, the firm is looking to recapitalize its family office with some debt as interest rates drop.

“Like any large institution, you're always looking at your source of capital and with rates coming down, we're looking at leveraging the potential of debt in our capital structure and seeing if that's right,” Dickson said. “It's just good corporate citizenship that you would always look at what's out there, and when we started looking at the debt markets as a potential opportunity to leverage our existing capital, we had a ton of interest. We just asked someone to coordinate that process.”



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