Merrill Team Forms RIA to Serve 'Family Next Door'
The $420 million group is “a great fit for the independent wealth arena,” Dynasty head Shirl Penney says.
A group of three financial advisors who managed $420 million in assets at Merrill Lynch have gone independent and launched RIA Steadmont Advisors in Birmingham, Alabama.
Taylor Hart, Mimi Dunn and Amy Drinkard are now working with Dynasty Financial Partners. They will use Fidelity as their custodian, eMoney for financial planning and Black Diamond for performance reporting.
The team is “a great fit for the independent wealth arena,” Dynasty’s president and CEO, Shirl Penney, said in a statement. “Because of their commitment to staying on the cutting edge of technology and investing, they will flourish with access to the full marketplace of strategies, research, and tools.”
The Steadmont group defines its typical clients as “the family next door that quietly saved or is saving towards their goals of retirement and beyond,” according to a statement. This includes business owners, lawyers, doctors, engineers and others, who also are “multi-generational and family oriented” in their view of wealth.
“Now more than ever, being able to be flexible and nimble in services provided and fee structures is imperative. We believe that with our newly added technological capabilities, we will be able to manage our client relationships, assets, and financial plans better and more efficiently,” Hart said in a news release.
The advisors conducted years of “conversations and due diligence in the space,” according to Dunn. “Dynasty provided us with something unique and that was the ability to start our own RIA and own our [Form] ADV and still have an operational partner during the pre-transition, transition, and on-going phases. They allowed us to have the best of both worlds.”
Hart, Steadmount’s president, began his work in the industry in 2007 at Wachovia Securities. His team moved to Merrill in 2011.
Dunn, Steadmount’s chief compliance officer, joined SouthTrust Bank in 1995, went on to work as a commercial credit analyst and joined Merrill in 1997. Drinkard began her career in 2012 at Merrill Lynch.
Pictured: Shirl Penney