Fidelis Capital, a registered investment advisory firm based in Tampa launched about two years ago with $1.5 billion in assets under advisement, has hired Douglas Rothermich as a partner and wealth strategist. Rothermich took some time off from the wealth management industry to reach a non-solicitation agreement, but before that, he spent more than 20 years at TIAA as vice president of wealth planning strategies, advising clients with over $1 billion in assets .
Rothermich, who built TIAA's family office group, will be charged with expanding Fidelis' planning capabilities.
In considering his next move, Rothermich said he looked at firms of all sizes and even considered starting his own. He drew on the Fidelis model of bringing together professionals with experience in their respective fields.
“A lot of organizations, when they start out, are so focused on talking to customers or building assets,” he said. “What I thought Fidelis did extremely well was they first built a platform that could serve very high net worth and high net worth families.”
Matthew Ellis, founding partner and president of Fidelis, said Rothermich will focus on tax planning, trust and estate planning, asset location and titles, among others. Rothermich will also continue Fidelis' strategy of continuous communication between investment and wealth planning parties.
“Honestly, this is where most mainstream institutions have failed: they have an isolated set of investments; they have a siled planning group. And it's not an iterative process,” Ellis said.
Fidelis was created in August 2022 when two teams of advisors from Wells Fargo Private Bank and Bank of America Private Bank merged. The teams wanted to bring private banking services to the independent space at a time when large institutions were cutting back on these services.
Ellis said he fell in love with the old model of private banking, where there was a fiduciary duty and a team of professionals in several different disciplines working together to serve a small number of clients. But things changed with the global financial crisis and large firms focused more on scaling their capabilities to accommodate a HNW pool and managing risks, controls and legal exposure.
“I found myself fighting more against the institution for the client than using the resources for the client,” he said.
Since inception, the firm has added a number of professionals; last September, they added a team of five advising on more than $4.5 billion in client assets from Bank of America Private Bank. That team opened a Fidelis office in Washington, D.C. Also in September, RIA hired Christopher Gunster by Bank of America Corp. as head of fixed income strategies. Gunster has built a proprietary direct indexing capability for fixed income.
Ellis expects the firm to reach $2 billion in AUA by the end of this year.
Prior to joining TIAA, Rothermich was an attorney at Bryan Cave, where he worked with very high net worth clients on estate planning matters and narrow business interests.