Jim Dickson is the visionary who led the founding, development and launch of Sanctuary Wealth as an innovative, partnered independence network for elite advisors. Jim spent 20+ years in numerous senior leadership roles at Merrill Lynch. Reporting directly to the CEO, Jim spent the last six years as a divisional executive and member of the firm’s executive committee. In addition to his day-to-day responsibilities, Jim was actively involved in spearheading Bank of America’s leadership development program and helped inspire and train the next generation of the firm’s managers.
Russ Prince: With many options available for financial advisors looking for independence or succession planning strategies, why do advisors choose Sanctuary Wealth?
Jim Dickson: I think one of the main things that sets Sanctuary apart is our concept of partnered independence. Becoming a partner with Sanctuary empowers advisors to be business owners rather than employees and provides them with the freedom and flexibility to run their business as they see fit.
As a Sanctuary partner, they never have to go it alone because they have the support and resources of a much larger organization to back them up. In less than four years since we launched, we’ve successfully transitioned 44 former wirehouse teams in addition to independent teams choosing to join our platform.
Our job is not to tell our advisor partners what to do, but to provide them with the tools and resources they need to grow their businesses, whether that be organically or via M&A, and we grow alongside them. And we offer different flavors of independence that give advisors flexibility in how they join. For example, we recently formed a joint venture with two of Sanctuary’s Texas-based partner firms—Concenture Wealth Management and G Squared Private Wealth, to provide a new avenue to independence for individual advisors and startup practices, as well as an attractive exit for advisors looking to retire or gain the support of a larger network. Other solo advisors have chosen to tuck in with existing Sanctuary partners. Looking forward, we anticipate continuing to add new ways to grow the Sanctuary network with our current and future partners.
Prince: How does Sanctuary Wealth keep up with ever-changing industry trends to best service its partner firms?
Dickson: The industry as a whole is rapidly evolving and so is Sanctuary. Our goal has always been to offer a broad range of solutions and the latest technology. We combine that with the resources of a global asset manager, membership in a community of peers willing to share ideas and best practices, as well as compliance and other back-office support that is crucial to running a successful advisory business.
And we’ve continued to expand what our platform has to offer in response to what we’ve heard from our advisors. The three biggest enhancements over the past year are Sanctuary Global, Sanctuary Global Family Office and Sanctuary Insurance Solutions.
Sanctuary Global is headquartered in Miami under the leadership of President Bob Walter and Managing Director Rudy Rake. We saw the wirehouses walking away from the international business, leaving advisors working in that niche with nowhere to turn. So, we created Sanctuary Global, an entity designed to help advisors serving clients outside the U.S. We give them access to a multi-custodial, hybrid platform and a full range of services, support and resources so they can deliver an optimal experience and advisory solutions across fixed income, equities and commodities to international institutional investors and wealth management clients. We’re proud of the fact that we’ve added more than $1 billion in assets in the international space.
Insurance should be a key component of any client’s long-range financial planning, so we created Sanctuary Insurance Solutions to aid advisors in providing estate planning, business succession planning and other insurance solutions to an exclusive clientele. To make that offering more robust, we formed a strategic alliance with Global Wealth Financial, an insurance specialist working with high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families in the U.S., Latin America and Europe.
The launch of Sanctuary Global Family Office was facilitated by an investment we made in InnoVise Family Wealth Advisors. Based in Los Angeles and led by Brian Wiener and Mike Winn, this multi-family office delivers innovative, completely customized and actively managed advice and solutions including an outsourced CIO-CFO platform, as well as tax-efficient estate planning, business succession and pre-event planning solutions.
Those are just a few highlights of our recent activity. Our goal is not to keep up with the industry’s changes, but to help set the pace.
Prince: How does Sanctuary Wealth empower advisors to succeed?
Dickson: The most important way that Sanctuary Wealth empowers advisors to achieve success is by recognizing that it’s their business and their clients that take priority. That means allowing them the freedom to operate in the way that best serves their clients while giving them the support they need to succeed, including an open architecture platform, a cutting-edge technology stack and a community of like-minded entrepreneurial advisor peers to constructively build their businesses alongside.
We also support advisors through organic and inorganic growth, as we find that offering them more options to scale is the future of the industry. Looking ahead, we will continue to build out our platform alongside our advisor partners, ensuring that they are armed with best-in-class solutions as the industry evolves.
Russ Alan Prince is the executive director of Private Wealth magazine and one of the leading authorities in the private wealth industry. He consults with family offices, the wealthy, fast-tracking entrepreneurs and select professionals. Connect with him on LinkedIn.com.