Scott MacKillop, who offered his pioneering flat-fee turnkey asset administration platform First Ascent Asset Administration to GeoWealth in 2023 and continued with the corporate as a strategic advisor, left the agency earlier this week.
In an interview with WealthManagement.com, MacKillop stated he and his staff spent a lot of final 12 months integrating First Ascent into GeoWealth, and that work is now finished.
“There clearly wasn’t going to be the sort of function that was going to be significant to me going ahead,” he stated.
MacKillop pioneered a flat-fee pricing mannequin for turnkey asset administration when he based First Ascent in 2016. He stated on the time it “did not appear honest” that RIAs paid asset managers a share of AUM when it value these managers no extra to run a $1 million portfolio than it did a $100,000 account.
First Ascent would go on to amass an account opening know-how platform and launch a sequence of ESG portfolios, amongst different iterations. MacKillop stated he and his staff offered the agency to GeoWealth in 2023 as a result of his firm wanted a “fashionable know-how platform that would accommodate the growing calls for of advisors for flexibility and customization,” in accordance with a LinkedIn put up.
On the time of the sale, GeoWealth’s CEO Colin Falls stated First Ascent introduced a excessive stage of funding consulting and companies to full-service RIAs which might complement his agency’s give attention to enterprise know-how. First Ascent had some 80 RIAs on the platform and $1.4 billion in belongings when GeoWealth acquired it.
“Over 9 years in the past my colleagues and I began First Ascent, the primary flat charge TAMP. We had no track-record, no AUM, and no funding—just a bit family and friends cash,” MacKillop wrote on LinkedIn. “It’s time for my subsequent skilled journey.”
He says he’s at present exploring alternatives, whether or not that be a full-time or part-time place or serving on a board. He stated he doesn’t anticipate to start out one other firm on his personal.
“There are good guys and dangerous guys on the market within the monetary companies world, in an actual black-and-white manner of it,” he stated. “I need to discover somebody who’s doing one thing that’s actually optimistic for his or her purchasers and helps advisors, and is much less targeted on rising one thing massive and making a number of cash doing it.”
Previous to launching First Ascent in 2016, MacKillop served as president for eight years at Denver-based Frontier Asset Administration. He offered his possession curiosity again to the agency in 2015 after a disagreement with different executives over its path.