When Pallas Capital Advisors said on Friday that a $300 million UBS team joined its ranks, it seemed like one of those garden-variety announcements that comes across the transom every day in the wealth management space. But of course, all of these transactions are important and they all have a story to tell. In Pallas Capital’s case, its transaction signals its first move to attract wirehouse advisor teams to its wealth management platform.
Based in the Boston suburb of Braintree, Mass., Pallas Capital was formed in 2019 and became a registered investment advisor the following year. While it’s a new firm in a technical sense, its main players all have significant résumés covering lengthy tenures at wirehouses and large financial services companies.
“It’s a collective effort of about 100-plus years of experience,” said Richard Mullen, founding parter and CEO. Prior to the formation of Pallas Capital, Mullen was responsible for all corporate financial planning engagements at UBS, and before that was a top-level executive at Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management and vice president of investments at Prudential Securities.
Mullen had worked closely with Greg Boyle when both were at UBS and Morgan Stanley, and they talked about creating a family-office-type firm to serve ultra-high-net-worth clients. While at UBS, one of the key outside experts they worked with was Charles Evangelakos, an estate planning strategist with Sagemark Consulting, a division of Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp. Together, the trio launched Pallas Capital, a name derived from Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom (she's also the goddess of warcraft, though the company emphasizes the “wisdom” part of her mythological legacy).
Evangelakos is the firm’s chief financial officer and Boyle is managing director. The company bolstered its ranks by hiring James Landry as chief operating officer and planning director, as well as Mark Bogar as chief investment officer. Landry formerly was director of financial planning at Lincoln Financial Network, and Bogar joined from BNY Mellon, where as a CIO was responsible for $10 billion in assets under management.
“We created a platform that speaks to the needs of the wirehouse advisors in particular because that’s where we came from and that’s what we really understand,” Mullen said. “We understand what’s been going on at the wirehouses and how they’ve changed so much, and how people don’t really enjoy working there anymore because they’re so restrictive about what type of business their people can do.
“We lead with planning, and make available to advisors the tremendous resources we have in-house,” he continued.
That’s what brought certified financial planner Joseph Cullen, his three-member team and their $300 million in assets under management from UBS to Pallas Capital's RIA, as the company announced.
“Our business DNA is in the the ultra-high-net-worth space,” Mullen said. “Coming out of Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management, we’re not looking for thousands of mass-affluent clients because that’s not what we do. And Joe Cullen’s team has a very similar business [model], and he recognizes the value of planning. So it was a natural fit.”
Mullen said he and Boyle had collaborated with Cullen and his team during their UBS days. “Joe’s clientele looks a lot like ours,” he commented. “I’d say 20% to 30% of our business is Hollywood-type names including producers, heads of networks, and so on. And the rest is scattered across the country, but mainly in Boston among CEOs, entrepreneurs and C-suite executives.”
Mullen noted that Pallas Capital expects to add additional advisor teams to the company later this year. “We have another significant team joining us within 30 days that will be of equal or larger value than the Cullen team,” he said. That team is in the New York City metro area.
Mullen said that by year end Pallas Capital expects to bring on board two other advisor teams that both have client assets under management in the low- to mid-nine-digit range.