Fledgling niche wealth firm sets up in the Big Apple. ThinkWealth Management just snatched a high-end brokerage team from UBS. The move gives ThinkWealth, the 10-month-old wealth management unit of San Francisco-based research and investment-banking firm ThinkEquity Partners, a toehold in the Northeast and its first branch office.

Pascal Besman, previously a senior v.p. with UBS, leads ThinkWealth’s New York team, which is housed in ThinkEquity’s midtown Manhattan office. As a managing director of ThinkWealth, he works with his former UBS teammates Alexander MacCormick and Holly Pippitt.

Specialists

ThinkWealth’s director Stephen Hohenrieder doesn’t seem worried about competing in the country’s biggest wealth market. “New York City, and [its] metropolitan region, is one of the most over-served yet under-serviced markets in the nation for high-net-worth wealth management clients,” he says in a press release. “Having observed the trend of large financial institutions acquiring investment advisors, we believe there is significant demand for an un-conflicted, client-focused firm.”

In any case, says Besman, ThinkWealth is more focused on strategic fit than on geographic expansion. He says his team “takes a two-prong approach” by providing wealth advice to biotech and healthcare professionals – meaning, for the most part, biotech company CEOs and physicians – and by advising “people who investment in healthcare companies” such as hedge funds, family offices and high-net-worth investors. And his client base isn’t restricted to the New York area, or even the Northeast.

“We’re bilingual in that we speak the languages of finance and science,” adds Besman. That allows him and his teammates to provide clients specific views on industry developments, share insights on how healthcare companies are perceived in the marketplace, and, no less important, help industry players connect with one another.

Besman says that makes his team a logical fit with ThinkWealth, whose parent ThinkEquity provides research, advice and capital to investors and corporate clients in the technology, healthcare, media and consumer-business sectors.

“[ThinkWealth’s] goal is not to have 2,000 people [on staff], or even 200 people,” says Besman. “I think ultimately the goal is to have 50, and that’s a four-year project. More important than numbers of people is selecting the right people.”

Backgrounds

The liftout from UBS is a case in point, says Hohenrieder. “The addition of the Besman group is another important step in the growth of ThinkWealth Management,” he says in a press release. “Our professionals are the most critical component in successfully executing our value proposition to the client and we are confident that [Besman], [McCormick] and [Pippitt] will contribute as a strategic addition to the team.”

Before joining UBS early in 2001, Besman was a managing director with Bear Stearns. Before that he was with Lehman Brothers. In addition to having what ThinkWealth calls “a distinguished record of providing his clients with advisory services” over the past two decades, Besman is also a fiction writer. His novel Dead Heat, a thriller, was published in 2003.

MacCormick, who helped Besman build UBS’ biotech and healthcare wealth team from its inception, comes to ThinkWealth as a v.p. Pippitt joins as an associate. Before joining UBS, she was a research assistant in neuroradiology at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. As an associate research scientist at the New York University School of Medicine she helped develop an optical imaging tool for communicating with autistic children.

UBS declined to comment on the team’s departure as a matter of policy. ThinkWealth wasn’t feeling especially talkative either. Such reticence makes it hard to determine the size of Besman’s book at UBS or to understand how much of it ThinkWealth expects to see.

Portability

A broker typically takes around 65% of his book with him to a new firm, says Allen Starkie of Knightsbridge Advisors, a New York-based executive placement and strategic consulting firm that focuses on the wealth-management industry. That’s come down from around 85% just a few year ago – the result, says Starkie, changes in the marketplace. “Clients have become more sophisticated and demanding; as a result brokerages have become less purely asset-management oriented,” he says. “As you bring more advisors into the relationship, the clients become more institutionalized.” In other words, brokerage-based advisory teams help keep clients from bolting when one of their advisors jump ship.

But Starkie also notes that specialist team like Besman’s might see more of its book follow it to new digs. “The more specialized you are and the more your clients view you as an important part of their lives, the more portable their assets,” he says.

ThinkWealth combines “the objectivity of a multi-family office with the advantage of a large team of experts in various disciplines” to arrive at an advisory practice [that] is expressly committed to eliminating client conflicts of interest,” according to its most recent press release. The firm’s services include “asset allocation analysis and modeling, hedging and monetization of concentrated equity positions, fixed-income portfolio analysis and construction, manager search and due diligence across multiple strategies, client education and development, and consolidated reporting.”

The point, says Besman, is that ThinkWealth outsources almost everything but its advice. “We’re not a huge monolith that’s trying to accommodate thousands of brokers with thousands of clients, so we’re much nimbler in helping our clients find truly best-of-breed solutions,” he adds. “We have no inventory.”

ThinkWealth declined to say how much it has in assets under advisory. It was equally reluctant to say how many people it employs. –FWR

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