Aspen Standard Wealth, a $15 billion-asset independent RIA platform, might remind readers of Focus Financial Partners in its pre-IPO days. Like Focus, Aspen is backed by private equity and buys controlling interests in firms. As with the early version of Focus, Aspen lets its affiliates keep their brands, cultures, and autonomy while supplying centralized support. But Aspen CEO Aly Kassim-Lakha says that is where the comparisons end. "Focus built something significant, and they proved to the industry that independent firms could partner with outside capital at scale, and I have respect for that," says Kassim-Lakha, who worked in Goldman Sachs' investment business and at private-equity firm Advent International before forming Aspen in 2024. "But we made a fundamentally different set of design choices at the foundation."
Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Kassim-Lakha explains why he pitches his holding company as a "permanent home" for practices, shares the specific pain points Aspen was built to solve, and describes the staggering discrepancy between the time advisors spend preparing for, versus actually holding, client meetings.
What do Barron's Advisor readers need to know about Aspen? It's a permanent home. When we partner with firms, we do so in perpetuity, with no intention of selling every three to five years. We focus with our partners in three areas-growth, talent, and technology-which correspond to some of the biggest pain points and sources of anxiety in the industry.
I can tell you about who we built Aspen for, because I suspect a lot of readers will recognize themselves. Imagine you founded an RIA 30 years ago. You left the wirehouse because you wanted to serve your clients in a different way, and you built the firm client by client. You've made clients' retirements possible; you've seen their kids grow up. Your name might be on the door. Now you're in your 60s, and there's a math problem. The people you'd love to hand the firm to can't afford to buy it, and you can't give away your family's largest asset. Consolidators are calling you, and that means your name comes down, the investment philosophy gets standardized away, the clients who trusted you personally become accounts on someone else's platform. All that with the firm relying on you now more than ever.
Aspen exists so that the founder has a good answer to that riddle. We partner in perpetuity and protect what took a lifetime to build. The name stays on the door, the investment philosophy stays theirs. The team keeps building their careers under the same roof. And we take the weight off the future of that founder's shoulders. That means supporting them with growth, supporting them with hiring the next generation, and supporting them with bringing the technology infrastructure that will usher in the future for that firm.
What do you mean when you say Aspen is a permanent home? That is a big promise, especially for a firm that is backed by private equity in a system where everything is eventually for sale. What do you tell skeptical advisors? There are reasons for this skepticism. The founders we've been talking to have probably taken calls from a dozen buyers, and some of them had made those promises that lasted as long as the fund that financed them. So I tell them to judge the investment partner, because capital takes on the character of the partner behind it. Our private-equity partner, Alpine Investors, is a firm with a long-term investment horizon, one that thinks of building companies over decades and generations. Their whole model is about finding businesses where people are the asset and backing individuals and teams over the long haul, and winning because employees and clients genuinely want to be there.
I'm very fortunate to have Alpine as a partner. We looked at wealth management and saw the same thing: an industry where trust is the product, and where clients stay for decades because of how they're treated. We therefore concluded that the only way to build something valuable here was to be worthy of that trust over a very long time. So we made that commitment. So the permanence means that the firm does not go back into the market when a founder joins Aspen. Their firm retains or made it special: the brand, the name, the investment philosophy, the careers of its employees, the client experience. We find ways to solve for liquidity, but the firm stays intact. That is the core of the promise.
How do you support your practices? First, the industry has a growth problem, and often that is because the founder has been at the center of growth for a very long period. We ask them to have a partner that supports them across every way in which you can grow. Organic growth tends to be at the top of the list of pain points of the industry. We've planted a flag in digital marketing, because it allows us to expand the perimeter of a firm beyond an individual geography. That is been extraordinarily powerful for us, and we're proud of some of our results. Our earliest firms have inflected from zero or low-single digits to double-digit growth organically. They've increased in service offerings, scale, and what they can offer their employees, and we're proud of that.
The second area of support is around talent. With a firm that is growing, the question is who is going to service that growth from an advisor standpoint. Another question: Is there a bench of leaders beyond the founder? We can support succession when that time comes. We have a whole talent practice within Aspen to support recruitment and placement of advisors and the next generation of leaders, and we've done that now with every one of our firms. In technology, one of the greatest concerns is cyber risk and how you position your firm for AI. It is an investment that is beyond what any one firm can make, and we've made that investment so that we can support our firms in ushering in the next era of technology to the benefit of their advisors and clients alike. It's a real pain point, and when firms partner with Aspen, they benefit from our support there. Getting growth, talent, and technology right is a big part of our value.
Have you tweaked your model since you started, based on getting real experience helping firms? No, we've learned more about how to serve pain points. But the model has not changed.
What have you learned about how to serve pain points better? I learned just how much of the invisible work sits underneath wealth management. I didn't fully appreciate the scale until we measured it. So over the past year, to support our firms with AI, we looked at the workflows inside every firm in great depth, perhaps more than we would have if AI had not taken the world by storm as it has.
What we found was striking: For every hour an advisor spends working with a clients and serving the relationship, there are anywhere from two to 20 hours of preparation behind the meeting-gathering documents, reconciling data, following up with details of someone's life, and that is what happens at the at the well-run firms. This business is about holding someone's hands through life's moments-marriage, business sales, deaths in the family, and advisors can't do that with bloated and cumbersome infrastructure. So we've learned about that pain. This is about more than just providing a good CRM or portfolio accounting tool. This is investing so that we can give advisors hours back. Because every hour we recover goes back to the family. I don't think I appreciated how severe the problem and the pain points were until we sat down and observed. And now we feel we have a good handle on it. But there's a lot of work to do and a lot of investment to make for us to meet the end goal.
What degree of independence do your affiliate firms need to surrender? In other words, which decision can only be made at the Aspen level, and which are left to individual teams? It's really about the alignment around what matters in the business. The pillars that I just shared are important because they ensure we are attracting the right partner. Do we want to grow organically? Is that a value? It's not a given-many founders take a different approach; they are OK with a firm that is flat or is not pushing the frontier. Do you want to invest in the next generation? Many firms are not really thinking that way; they're thinking about their P&L, not about the next generation. And many firms don't really care if the technology is cumbersome. They're happy with where things are. So it's mostly the level of alignment that governs.
Do firms have to convert to a centralized investment menu? No, they keep the same offering. We think it's important that you preserve your service model, that you preserve your investment philosophy, that you keep serving the people the way they want to be served.
Is the size range of the firms that you are hoping to partner with generally about $1 billion of assets under management and up? That is right, $500 million is probably the low end. But on average, $1 billion to $5 billion is the range. That tends to be where the problems around the areas we talked about converge, and where firms are starting to think about the next generation or how to institutionalize, and that is where we can really help.
Have firms asked you for help with capital to make their own acquisitions? Yes. Strategic M&A can make sense for different reasons: to expand geographically because your clients have moved, to provide an expanded service offering to move into a different segment of the market, to provide more opportunity for employees to develop a new muscle. For example Summitry, which is based in Northern California, acquired a firm called Vantage Wealth, which is based in Southern California. The CEO wanted to expand his offering to the whole of California. We've had three or four firms choose to acquire another firm so they can meet a strategic objective, and it's been a way in which you can really help them grow.