Snowden Capital Advisors Makes Trio Of Senior Hires From Merrill Lynch

Eliane Chavagnon

4 December 2012

New York City-headquartered Snowden Capital Advisors, a dual listed RIA and broker-dealer, has made three senior appointments.

Lyle LaMothe joins as non-executive chairman of the board, while Greg Franks starts as managing partner and president. Finally, Chris Lappas has been named chief operating officer.

LaMothe is a senior partner of Left Hand Logic, a business consulting firm focused on the independent financial services industry. He was formerly head of US wealth management at Merrill Lynch.

Meanwhile, Franks was latterly Western/Mid-Atlantic division director and regional managing director of US wealth management at Merrill Lynch.

Lappas was previously a regional director for wealth management and banking in the Northeast region at Merrill Lynch. Prior to that, he worked at Prudential Securities and Citibank.

As well as the hires, Snowden has brought in two new strategic investors: Bob Doll, chief equity strategist and senior portfolio manager at Nuveen Asset Management and former BlackRock chief equity strategist, along with Brinker Capital, an independent asset management firm based in Berwyn, PA.

Doll and Charles Widger, executive chairman of Brinker Capital's board of directors, will join Snowden's strategic advisory board, which also includes LaMothe and Pete Mooney.

Doll, who left his post as BlackRock's chief equity strategist in June, joined Chicago-based Nuveen Asset Management at the end of November. Doll remains at BlackRock in an advisory capacity throughout the remainder of 2012.

In other related moves, last week Snowdon added the DiCiaccio and LaMothe-Gonzalez teams from Merrill Lynch, representing over $500 million in client assets under management. As part of this, John DiCiaccio, Leah Thomson Snell, Jon LaMothe and Luis Gonzalez joined Snowdon as partners and founded a West Coast branch office in Pasadena, CA, for the firm.