By Kenneth Corbin

Hightower built a national network of wealth management practices by promising the advisors who joined it a significant amount of independence in how they run their businesses.

Now, the Chicago-based company is offering advisors another option: operate under the Hightower brand and agree to use some of the firm's centralized services such as client onboarding and portfolio management.

The channel, called Hightower Signature Wealth, or HTSW, is a new initiative under CEO Larry Restieri, who took the top spot at the registered investment advisor firm in June.

In an interview with Barron's Advisor, Restieri described the new channel as a hallmark of the third phase of the company's evolution, following its origin as a destination for breakaway brokers and then as a private-equity-backed acquirer of RIAs operating on the Hightower platform.

"This next phase is really about how do we integrate all that, how do we make it work together more as one firm," Restieri says.

Restieri says Hightower plans to actively promote the channel to its advisory teams but won't insist that any of its RIA practices give up their independence.

"We're not going to force teams into Hightower Signature Wealth," he says. "As we build out more centrally managed solutions, I would encourage teams to look at them, and we'll have those conversations with them, but we're not going to force anything, and we're going to still allow advisors to have choice."

Frontier Investment Management, one of Hightower's largest and fastest-growing practices, will be the only team to operate on the channel when it launches. Hightower is planning to merge in at least two teams in January and more throughout the first quarter. It has an acquisition agreement with one firm that it plans to fold directly into the channel, with others to follow.

Restieri offers a ballpark estimate that Hightower might eventually have a 50-50 split between firms it acquires that will join its platform under the current model and those that will affiliate through HTSW. There is a strategy at work there. Restieri says that Hightower's model has meant that it has missed out on some acquisition opportunities involving firms looking to sell to an aggregator that takes more control over the business operations of the practices it acquires.

"The last few years, a lot of acquisitions in the RIA space have been for conforming teams, I'll call it, so firms that want to join a Creative [Planning,] a Mercer, a WEG -- we haven't really played in that space because we've been only really a firm for independent shops," he says.

By the end of next year, Restieri envisions that between 10% to 20% of Hightower's assets under management will sit in the HTSW channel.

Restieri insists that the launch of HTSW doesn't signify Hightower moving away from its roots as a home for independent practices, and dismisses the potential for tension between the two channels.

"We have to be true to who Hightower is," he says. "There are some great advisors out there who are independent and want to stay independent, and of the mega-RIAs, I want us to be the home for them. But that said, I don't think that's in conflict with having a great, branded firm."

The new channel could help Hightower address the succession challenges advisors on its platform face. A more cohesive, national "firm within a firm," as Restieri describes it, could make it easier to match younger talent with older advisors approaching retirement without a next-generation leadership plan.

The HTSW channel will tap into Hightower's centralized investment platform, which the company brought on former State Street executive Randy Bullard to oversee earlier this year. Stephanie Link, Hightower's chief investment strategist and a frequent CNBC contributor, will be the investment lead of the new channel.

For the first time, Restieri says, Hightower will have a "direct-to-consumer brand" as investors working with advisors in the HTSW channel will know their wealth manager's firm as Hightower by name.

"If you think about it, Hightower has been this great brand among the advisor community but hasn't really invested in the consumer end of it," he says. "We have Stephanie Link on TV, but we don't really have a direct-to-consumer presence, so let's embrace that."

The launch of the new channel counts as Hightower's most significant initiative since Restieri took over from former CEO Bob Oros. When he joined Hightower, Restieri says it quickly became clear that there were efficiencies to be realized from a more centralized operating structure.

"I think my fingerprints are pretty well on this thing," he says. "As I came in, I felt like the riddle we had to answer was how do we accelerate growth, have a systematic way that the home office can influence what's going on, and remain true to who Hightower is -- I think this became the natural outgrowth of that."

Advisor buy-in is another question. Already Hightower offers many back-office services to its advisors, but its culture of independence has meant that adoption of those services has been uneven.

Launching the new channel with Frontier as a first participant and more to come in the next few months, Restieri hopes that it will become a proof-of-concept that will convince more advisors to affiliate with HTSW.

"Advisors want you to show them that it works first," he says. "So my view is if we can prove it in Hightower Signature Wealth that we can do it better than they can do it, then they will adopt the central process, and the more we can get scale in the central process the better off we are."

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October 15, 2025 08:00 ET (12:00 GMT)

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