Trade veteran John Napolitano, who constructed U.S. Monetary Advisors beneath LPL Monetary and offered it to Nice Valley Advisor Group in 2021, has launched a brand new registered funding advisor with $616 million in belongings beneath administration and 140 purchasers.
Braintree, Mass.-based Napier Monetary is majority owned by Napolitano, the agency’s founder and chairman; Alexander Weiss, president, wealth supervisor and chief compliance officer; and Napolitano’s son Rob Napolitano, managing associate and director of different investments.
Different house owners embody Thomas Fletcher, chief funding officer; Thomas Schulte, associate and director of economic planning; William Clement; and Shaun Dacunha, in keeping with the agency’s Type ADV.
Napier Monetary has 14 workers, eight of whom are advisors, the agency’s Type ADV mentioned. LPL is Napier’s broker-dealer/custodian.
The agency presents funding choices to its purchasers in mutual funds, equities and ETFs. Ron Napolitano runs GenWel Capital, which is Napier’s personal funding group, the place the agency invests in actual property and personal debt.
Napier additionally supplies household workplace companies, corresponding to belief and property companies, invoice pay, private CFO/government companies, tax and accounting companies, actual property companies, government and household help, philanthropic assist and present planning.
“It is a very strong, absolutely built-in wealth administration mannequin the place we do not simply make investments cash and provides lip service to the wealth administration. We’re intense about all elements of the monetary planning course of—threat administration, household governance, property planning and tax planning,” Napolitano mentioned. “And being a recovering CPA, I’ve a particular affinity in direction of the tax aspect, particularly the property and belief aspect.”
Napier purchasers are typically high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth, with small purchasers having $5 million to $10 million in web value, and common purchasers $10 million to $25 million.
“After which our newer breed of purchasers, which we have labored on within the final 5 years, have web value of $25 million to $75 million,” he mentioned. “With just a few larger.”
This final demographic is of explicit curiosity to Napolitano as, he mentioned, they’re not sufficiently big to be served by the household workplace neighborhood, but too massive for a lot of advisors.
“Most of our new purchasers come from a wirehouse atmosphere or have had an advisor who’s been the shopper’s buddy for 30 years. They usually’ve simply outgrown it as a result of most of these advisors are actually simply asset managers who name themselves monetary planners. However they’re actually not,” Napolitano mentioned.
The result’s that these purchasers arrive at Napier with massive gaps of their planning, “corresponding to trusts which are 20 years and meaningless at this level,” he mentioned.
“Inside the first assembly, it turns into painfully apparent to the prospect that their incumbent workforce is simply not doing the job,” he mentioned. “A few of them surrounded by massive wirehouse names, a boutique legislation agency, a pleasant accounting agency. However all of them function as silos and there is not any integration. That is the place the gaps come from.”
Napolitano entered the business in 1993 as a dealer, and shortly turned dually registered. From 1998 to July of this yr, he targeted on constructing U.S. Monetary Advisors as “a mini tremendous OSJ” by LPL, he mentioned.
“We actually targeted on CPA corporations as a result of that is my background. I used to be an early adopter CPA monetary planner. And I reeled in plenty of accounting corporations, about 100 initially,” he mentioned. Nevertheless it was an excessive amount of, too shortly, he admitted, and the accountant-advisors weren’t precisely what Napolitano had envisioned.
“We requested lots of them to go away as a result of they had been simply type of moonlighting as monetary advisors, and I felt that was a harmful house to be,” he mentioned.
With 40 planning-focused advisors across the nation, U.S. Monetary Advisors labored primarily with high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth people, and grew to greater than $400 million in AUM by 2021.
“It was a enjoyable trip, however I actually missed truly being an advisor, versus teaching advisors and coaching advisors and serving to them with their tough circumstances,” he mentioned. “So we spent a bit time searching for somebody to purchase that enterprise so I might redirect my efforts.”
The customer was Nice Valley Advisor Group, headquartered in Wilmington, Del., with $9.7 billion in AUM, 191 advisors and about 33,000 purchasers as of this month, in keeping with the agency’s Type ADV.
Napolitano mentioned he and his U.S. Monetary Advisors workforce had a two-year transition settlement with Nice Valley, on the finish of which he tried to work inside the Nice Valley construction to give attention to one thing new. The “one thing new” was Napier Monetary, which Napolitano had launched in 2014 with a small workforce inside the U.S. Monetary Advisors agency.
“It turned clear about 5 years in the past that that is the place my ardour was and the place I wished to essentially refocus my efforts. We tried to work with Nice Valley on progress. However after some time we simply felt we would be higher served doing it on our personal,” Napolitano mentioned. “They had been simply mainly a back-office supplier—a ‘go get ‘em, tiger’ type of agency—with out providing any materials help with recruiting purchasers or serving to us discover advisors or acquisitions or issues like that.”
Napolitano holds an authorized monetary planner designation and can be a registered life coach, and a lot of the advisors on the agency additionally maintain the CFP designation.
