Friedman, also a founding partner of Hightower, has joined Summit Financial as its director of business development and growth.
Former Hightower and Dynasty Financial Partners executive Ed Friedman has rejoined one of his old coworkers at a multibillion dollar New Jersey RIA.
Friedman has joined Summit Financial as the firm’s director of business development and growth. Parsippany-based Summit Financial oversees around $5bn in assets, around $3.4bn of which it manages.
Summit has been on an expansionary track in recent months. The firm is attempting to woo RIAs to SummitVantage, a turnkey program through which affiliated advisors can access Salesforce, eMoney Advisor and Addepar software, as well as Summit’s investment program.
One of Friedman’s main goals will be to draw more advisors into the program.
‘My primary responsibility will be connecting with advisors and RIA firms that are already in existence in order to present the Summit platform and what’s referred to as SummitVantage as well as a new platform focused on providing some monetization to existing RIAs and hopefully attracting them to Summit,’ he said.
By joining Summit, Friedman has an opportunity to reunite with one of his old Dynasty Financial Partners compatriots. Summit’s chief executive, Stan Gregor, served as one of Dynasty’s advisor recruiters from 2015 to 2016. Friedman served as Dynasty’s director of practice management for nearly six years before he departed the firm in September of 2019.
‘We’re excited to have Ed on board,’ Gregor said. ‘Ed and I have known each other for a while, obviously.’
Summit’s minority owner, Merchant Investment Management, also has plenty of Dynasty ties. Dynasty’s former CFO, Amit Grover, is Merchant’s CFO, while Merchant managing partner Tim Bello was an early-stage partner at Dynasty.
Friedman has plenty of experience in the platform business. He was a founding partner at Hightower Advisors, where he served as a managing director of advisor development, responsible for attracting advisors to the firm. Hightower sued Friedman several years after his departure, alleging he violated his severance agreement with the company.
Friedman most recently served as head of his own RIA consulting business, Morris Brook Consulting.
‘I was really impressed not only with what [Stan] had done at Summit but also what Summit had built through SummitVantage, as well as the technology that they’ve built and the whole platform and offering they were putting together for advisors.’ Friedman said. ‘It just struck me that Summit solved for many of the challenges that platform providers in our industry have.’
