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Shirl Penney, CEO of Dynasty Financial

Industry Spotlight > RIAs

$1B RIA Rejoins Dynasty Financial After 7 Years

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What You Need to Know

  • An RIA based in upstate New York with three offices has returned to the Dynasty Network after seven years on its own.
  • Ascent Wealth Partners rejoined Dynasty to take advantage of the support services it offers.
  • Since leaving Dynasty, Ascent has seen its business grow significantly and it now manages $1 billion in client assets.

Ascent Wealth Partners, an independent RIA with $1 billion in client assets, has rejoined the Dynasty Network after seven years on its own, Dynasty Financial Partners announced Monday.

Ascent, led by founding partners Brad Kowalczyk, Mark Moshier and Scott McCartney, has offices in New Hartford, Saratoga, and Elmira, New York, and originally joined the Dynasty Network in 2011.

The firm “reengaged” with Dynasty to make use of its Compliance, Outsourced Chief Finance Officer (OCFO), marketing, public relations and community offerings “all in an effort to continue the level of customized wealth management services they provide their clients,” Dynasty said in a news release.

Before joining Dynasty more than 10 years ago, Ascent “had been running an independent RIA that we broke away from,” Kowalczyk recalled in a statement supplied to ThinkAdvisor. “At that RIA, we had become accustomed to running every aspect of an independent firm in house from portfolio management to operations, and everything in between.”

Dynasty provided Ascent with “invaluable services” when it was transitioning from “our old firm to the establishment of our new firm,” he said.

However, after that, Ascent “elected to continue assuming responsibility for all aspects of running our firm,” which was “effectively the basis for us fondly leaving the Dynasty network at the time,” he recalled.

Since then, however, the “continued steady growth of our firm, along with the increasing sophistication and complexity of our client base, has caused us to reunite with Dynasty to take advantage of a variety of the support services they offer,” he explained. “We maintained purposeful contact and awareness throughout the year fully contemplating that this moment would come.”

The support that Dynasty provides on “middle and back-office activities allows us to provide high level of services to our clients,” Kowalczyk said in the news release.

“Mark and I have been good friends” with Dynasty CEO Shirl Penney “for a long time and it was clear we all wanted to find a path to partnership again to give us leverage to better care for clients and continue to build a better business,” Kowalczyk added.

Welcoming Ascent back to Dynasty, Penney said in a statement: “Our platform and products have grown and evolved tremendously since Ascent originally joined the Network ten years ago. They will now have access to the latest — cutting-edge technology, intellectual capital, integrations and capabilities to support their business.”

Calling the Ascent team members “wonderful client advocates [who] are always looking for ways to add more value to their client relationships,” Penney noted that the wealth management industry has “evolved significantly over the last ten years and the clients that Ascent serves have become increasingly more complex.

“Like many RIAs that have joined our network, we appreciate that the partners at Ascent recognize the value of outsourcing many of the core middle office service offerings so they can continue to serve their increasingly sophisticated client base,” Penney added.

Ascent’s three founding partners combined have “more than 70 years of experience providing financial advisory services to high-net-worth clients with sophisticated needs,” Dynasty said.

Ascent’s client base is made up of HNW individual investors and families, small corporations, family-owned businesses, foundations and endowments.

The Dynasty Network now includes 47 firms with 295 advisors in all across the U.S., with assets under administration of a combined $72 billion, according to its website.

(Pictured: Shirl Penney, CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners)


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