A group of more than a dozen prominent wealth management firms launched a new initiative on Wednesday aimed at deepening civic engagement and collaborating on best practices.
The Net Positive Consortium is an effort to compel RIAs across the industry to abide by a common set of guiding principles ranging from firms’ hiring efforts to the treatment of employees to charitable giving. Collectively, the founding members of the consortium manage over $200bn in client assets and include Mariner Wealth Advisors, Wealthspire, Perigon Wealth Management, Modera, Colony Group, Crestwood Advisors, Buckingham Strategic Partners and Brighton Jones.
Firms must apply to become a consortium member and pay an annual fee that ranges from $1,500 to $5,000 depending on the firm’s assets under management. Once a member, the firms can collaborate with other consortium firms to swap ideas and receive advice to build upon the initiatives they already have in place.
Grant Rawdin, founder and chief executive of Wescott Financial Advisory Group, a Philadelphia-based RIA that is also one of the consortium’s founding firms, told Citywire that the initiative emerged from the lack of an industry-wide organization centered around collaboration and mentorship.
‘It’s creating the environment where we’re all coming together in what is now a maturing industry with a lot more power, responsibility and generational shift behind it,’ said Rawdin, who is also one of the consortium’s two chairs alongside Gerald Goldberg of Focus Financial Partners affiliate GYL Financial Synergies.
The consortium is rooted in ‘five key pillars,’ or categories of initiatives that firms can undertake as a means of paying it forward. The pillars include initiatives centered around workforce, community, the environment, clients and industry. Applicant firms must already have programs or initiatives that fall into at least three of those five pillars to qualify for membership.
Specific initiatives that might fall into those pillars include employee career development programs, prioritizing diversity and inclusion committees, promoting financial literacy, sustainability efforts, knowledge-sharing in the industry, creating associate resource groups and charitable giving.
Along with the founding wealth management firms, the consortium is made up of several solution providers and advisory partners including Bento Engine and Andes Risk. Suzanne Siracuse, a facilitator of the consortium whose wealth management consulting firm is also an advisory partner to the initiative, told Citywire that the consortium is looking into gaining 501(c)(6) nonprofit status as it gets off the ground.
Siracuse said the initiative is especially important when considering what the future of the wealth management industry’s workforce looks like, as both the pipeline of upcoming talent and newer entrants into the field want to see how firms give back ‘inwardly and outwardly.’
‘The next generation of talent and the talent that is here now is expecting this,’ Siracuse said. ‘So we’re hoping that this initiative facilitates our industry garnering a better reputation, as well as answering some of the questions that new talent have about coming into the industry and what this industry is all about.’
In all, there are 20 founding members in the consortium, which includes 14 wealth management firms. The idea for the consortium came about in the spring of 2023, and the funding to determine if it could be created was put down earlier this year.
Siracuse said some of the consortium’s immediate goals include adding five additional member firms by the end of the year, building out a robust resource database on the initiative’s website, rolling in several strategic partners and promoting the consortium on a wider-scale.