It’s been one year since Larry Restieri, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs’ Ayco business, took the reins as CEO of Hightower, succeeding Bob Oros.
During the Wealth Management EDGE conference, held at The Boca Raton resort in Boca Raton, Fla., this week, Restieri provided a picture of what he’s been building at the firm, which he dubbed “Hightower 3.0.” It’s named that because he’s the third CEO, behind Elliot Weissbluth, who founded the firm in 2007, and Oros.
Restieri said he came in and told Hightower’s private equity owners that running a wealth business is not like running a plant for General Motors; you have to win the hearts of advisors, or you risk them jumping ship.
He had success at Goldman because he was able to do just that: he set the vision for Ayco and got people behind it, he told the EDGE audience.
Restieri said Hightower had always done base-level integrations, with a common tech stack, compliance, legal, etc. But they hadn’t integrated into the businesses themselves. Now, in this third chapter, he’s focused on moving up the value chain to integrate the middle office, starting with client onboarding and investment management.
This centralized wealth management platform, called Hightower One, is set to launch this summer, with full rollout at the end of 2026. Hightower One will be the wealth management platform used by Hightower firms in its new Signature Wealth division and will ultimately be an option for all Hightower advisors.
Restieri’s other goal has been to create a fully integrated RIA within the firm, and that effort is also well underway with Signature Wealth, Hightower’s national, direct-to-consumer brand, launched in October. He has already merged several Hightower firms into that model, and they did their first external acquisition in March, with $5 billion RIA Journey Strategy Wealth.
He said he expects that RIA to grow to $50 billion by the end of this year, via a combination of internal and external deals.
This model provides a more consistent structure, giving advisors “flexibility within a framework,” he said.
And in April, Hightower acquired The Bahnsen Group, a Newport Beach, Calif.-headquartered RIA with $9.5 billion in AUM, which has become another hub within Hightower for integrating other advisory firms.
Restieri was at Goldman Sachs when the firm bought United Capital, the RIA created by Joe Duran, in 2019, and sold that business to Creative Planning in 2023. At that time, Goldman owned the top of the wealth spectrum, and the bottom, with Marcus, its online platform. And this was a way to get at that layer in between.
But Goldman encountered the difficulties that come with owning an independent RIA inside of a highly regulated and regimented organization. Goldman changed the rulebook for United Capital advisors without giving them a copy.
“It was a clash of cultures,” he said.
