ThinkWealth grabs UBS team

Thomas Coyle

16 August 2005

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 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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