HighTower loses RIA with $1 billion of assets and Northern Trust street cred

Brooke’s Note: It’s always an eyebrow raiser when a roll-up experiences some unrolling. It happens. Focus Financial and United Capital have also lost advisors at times and they are booming along. At companies like Boston Private it was more of a sign of challenge. One thing about roll-ups of companies: They are really roll-ups of people. And not all people can foresee whether they’ll get along in the long run when they sign papers in the short run.

Margaret Towle has left HighTower Advisors a few months shy of her two-year anniversary.

The one-woman RIA team Margaret Towle came to the Chicago-based aggregator from Greycourt & Co. Inc.'s Minneapolis office to found and set up two HighTower offices: one in Minneapolis and the other in Seattle, where she maintains a second home.

At the time Towle said she was bringing along fewer than 10 clients with a combined $1 billion of assets under management. The clients were all endowments, foundations and ultra-high-net worth individuals. See: HighTower stages its first raid of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney’s elite consulting unit.

This story was first reported by FundFire’s Tom Stabile earlier today based on HighTower’s new ADV filing. HighTower confirmed her departure to RIABiz. (We’d provide a FundFire link but we don’t subscribe.)

Trail runs cold

Towle’s departure is not expected to throw the company off course — even in the short term, according to Elliot Weissbluth, CEO of HighTower.

“HighTower maintains the highest standards for performance and growth,” he says in a written comment. “We continue to operate from a position of strength and are on target for our growth plan in 2013. Our culture is our greatest asset, and we are committed to maintaining it, though we realize our firm will not be a fit for everyone.”

Towle was the product of a different culture from most of the financial advisors who call HighTower home. At Greycourt, she oversaw research and development across traditional and alternative asset classes. Towle also served a two-year term as a member of the Investment Management Consultants Association's board of directors.

Towle’s career also included a stop at Russell Investments. After that, she worked for an ex-Goldman Sachs trader who started a hedge fund in Sun Valley, Idaho. Towle also did a stint as chairman and CEO of Puget Sound Asset Management, a Seattle-based mimicker of hedge funds that she says was slightly ahead of its time. In the early 2000’s Towle began working for Northern Trust as CIO. In 2009, Bloomberg Wealth Manager named Towle one of the Top 50 Women in Wealth.

RIABiz has not received a response for comment from Towle it posted on her LinkedIn page.

What Towle’s LinkedIn page does not indicate is whether she has moved her book of business to another advisory firm or started a new practice. The LinkedIn page is updated to account for her departure the end of March.

Impressed with Black Diamond

When she joined HighTower in 2011, Towle said in an RIABiz interview the kind of advice she seeks to provide requires the shared infrastructure that HighTower is constructing. She also cited how impressed she is with Black Diamond software. See: Former Northern Trust CIO brings a cool billion and lofty credentials to HighTower.

The FundFire article also reports that former HighTower advisor Larry Gilbert did a reverse breakaway to Credit Suisse recently after spending four years at Chicago-based HighTower. Credit Suisse, through its ownership of AMF is the primary venture backer of HighTower. Gilbert came to HighTower from Goldman Sachs in 2009. For more on AMF, see: See: Weissbluth lands war chest for HighTower Advisors.

AMF did not provide financing last fall when HighTower was seeking it. See: HighTower passes up $40 million capital raise, takes a big breather from deals and implements a pacing regimen.