Insurer Alliant Hires Former Rise Partner to Grow Wealth Unit
Alliant Insurance Services, an insurance brokerage that launched a retirement and wealth division this summer, has a former Rise Growth Partners managing partner leading its charge into advisor recruiting and acquisition.
Dan Newhall, who helped launch Rise Growth with a team led by Joe Duran, joined Alliant as an executive vice president in September. He believes that a strategic, long-term acquirer with a fiduciary commitment could be a unique player in a market dominated by private equity-backed aggregators.
“Some of the misalignment that I found in the institutional private equity space had to do with the timing of the funds,” Newhall said. “We’re not building a business to flip over here, so it’s not a situation where we’re going to pay the highest multiple for a 65-year-old retiring advisor. … We’re looking for people that want to be incentivized to grow.”
Newhall said there are such advisors across the RIA, broker/dealer and wirehouse worlds interested in joining a W-2 employee structure. He’s targeting advisor teams of $200 million to $2 billion in client assets. But more than the asset level, he said, he aims to find advisors “looking for a home who don’t necessarily want to go and set up or run their own shop.”
Newhall was brought on by Amit Dogra, a new managing director and executive vice president at Alliant who is leading the creation of a division the firm calls Retirement & Wealth at Alliant.
The unit currently has $28 billion in assets under advisement and management but is linked to a larger insurance brokerage with over $5.1 billion in revenue, according to its most recent reporting.
Alliant is majority-owned by its managers and producers but also has private equity backing, including Stone Point Capital, which has investments in numerous wealth firms, such as Focus Financial Partners, OneDigital, and tax-advantaged savings provider Ascensus. Dogra, however, sought to separate Alliant from the private equity-backed RIAs.
“We’re not on an instant shot clock of a seven- to 10-year time horizon that you’re constantly looking [toward],” he said.
Dogra, who has held leadership roles at Sanctuary Wealth and Hightower Advisors, is charged with leveraging Alliant’s retirement plan consulting channels as a funnel for broader wealth, asset and cash management services.
“To bring the wealth management approach to a retirement plan for your key executives or your rank-and-file in totality is not something that’s been done,” Dogra said. “It’s either a one-off from the IRA [rollover] from the retirement plan side … or it’s at the top end of the market. … We want wealth management to be able to be a provider of service to the entire spectrum of wealth.”
Dogra acknowledged other large RIAs, such as Creative Planning, Hightower and Mariner, that are working to align employer-sponsored retirement plan advice with individual wealth management. There are also insurance brokerages, such as OneDigital, Hub International and Allera Group, that are working on the retirement-to-wealth convergence.
Dogra said one tactic he will use is to establish a financial wellness team that can work with participants until they are ready to address more complex financial needs. Newhall, he said, was brought on not just to add advisors to serve those clients, but to help them grow in a way that advances the division’s aggressive goal of reaching $100 million in revenue in five years.
“A lot of people in the industry are really good, but they’ve got their swim lanes,” Dogra said. “If you want to use a sports analogy, Dan’s like the decathlete—he doesn’t just do one track and field event; he can do multiple.”
Before helping to start Rise Growth, Newhall had spent six years with acquisitive RIA Perigon Wealth Management, where he held leadership roles in recruiting and partnerships and ultimately served as chief business development officer. After leaving Rise Growth after a little over a year, Newhall launched his own RIA investment practice but saw the Alliant opportunity as “too exciting to pass up.”
With Alliant, he said their recruiting strategy will not include compensation offers that are the “highest that’s out there in the private equity world.” Instead, he said they will focus on structuring a strong long-term offer.
“We’re more interested in finding a deal where yes, there’s a cash and equity component up front that should be compelling and interesting …. but there is an interest in keeping our goals aligned over time,” he said.
Alliant, whose 100-year history is rooted in insurance, will presumably seek cross-selling opportunities with its retirement and wealth division. But Newhall said the division would not have any sales mandates for advisors.
“This is a standalone wealth management business with extraordinary in-house opportunities for those advisors to continue growing their business over time,” Newhall said. “But there is no cross-selling mandate … that goes against the fiduciary nature of being an RIA and a true advisory business.”
