Jim Atwood and Phil Scott announced Monday the creation of Latigo Peak Partners, a Palm Beach Gardens, Florida-based wealth advisory firm with 48 employees. The firm’s initial assets make it one of the largest “breakaway” deals in recent years, where advisers start a new firm and take many of their clients with them. 

“There are not a lot of things out there where you get better as you get older. We’ve been doing this for 40 years, and plan on going for another 20 years,” Atwood said in an interview. “We want to build a family legacy business.”

Major employers have been taking notice of the trend: UBS Group AG recently increased compensation for thousands of its wealth advisers in the US after a series of high-profile exits from the firm. Last year, two other ex-JPMorgan bankers launched their own firm, Alta Vera Global Capital Advisors, managing US$400 million in assets.

A JPMorgan spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Atwood, 65, and Scott, 71, both began their careers at Merrill Lynch and later joined First Republic, which was acquired by JPMorgan in 2023. They most recently worked alongside each other managing JPMorgan’s wealth units in Boston and Bellevue, Washington, respectively. That depth of experience helped convince them that starting their own firm would give them more flexibility in managing their clients’ assets. 

“If you’re working within one of these firms, you’re confined to investment opportunities on their platform,” Atwood said. “It gets difficult to be as nimble as you want.”

Latigo Peak will focus on public equity investing, and also offer a suite of services more typically associated with a multifamily office, including tax planning, estate planning and advice on philanthropic giving. The firm’s creation was first reported by Barron’s. 

The business is backed entirely by the partners’ own capital, bucking a yearslong trend of independent RIAs seeking outside financing to scale up their operations. Much of that money has come from PE: private equity backed 88% of all deals in the RIA industry last year, according to a Fidelity Investments report.

“If you look at at the top 25 RIAs, there are only one or two that are not PE-backed,” Atwood said. “We had a lot of opportunities out there to partner with PE — but when you partner with another firm, what comes with that is they’re going to want to get out in five or six years. They’re going to have an idea of how to manage the business.”

“Phil and I are backing this 100% ourselves, which is a big differentiator,” he added. “It’s not cheap to do that.”

Scott and Atwood said they generated combined revenue at JPMorgan of more than US$130 million, a nearly fourfold increase from six years prior. The plan is to keep growing: Atwood estimated that more than 95% of the firm’s new business is coming from word-of-mouth referrals.

Both Atwood and Scott have homes in the Palm Beach area, and chose the location for the firm’s headquarters in part because of the growing demand they saw for wealth management services in the region.

“A lot of people are starting to have liquidity events — there wasn’t nearly as much M&A activity five years ago as there is today,” Scott said.

Latigo Peak also has offices in Bellevue, Boston and Los Angeles, and is looking at opening locations in Denver and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, within a year, Scott said.

The firm is named in part for a ski run at the Beaver Creek resort in Colorado. Atwood and Scott met at the mountain 35 years ago, where they’ve long had an annual get-together with a number of industry colleagues.

“There’s a run out of Beaver Creek called Latigo. We used to put on the helmets and see who could get down the fastest,” Atwood said.

“I always lost,” Scott added.

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