The wealth firm’s advisor-solutions unit eschews a mass-market approach. Multi-family office Lydian Wealth Management has officially re-branded its four-year-old “Advisor Solutions” group as Fortigent. Lydian says it adopted the name – which has been in the market for about a year already – to distinguish its third-party investment platform from its direct-to-client wealth-management services.

Rockville, Md.-based Lydian, a subsidiary of Palm Beach, Fla-based holding company Lydian Trust, has also tapped Henry Morneault, formerly head of wholesale banking at Riggs National Bank, to become Fortigent’s chief operating officer. “With his banking background and experience in managing multiple business lines, [Morneault] brings a unique perspective to Fortigent,” says Lydian’s president Andrew Putterman. “He will play a critical role in the development of our offering, and will help us meet our ambitious growth goals.”

Best of breed

Fortigent provides outsourced advisory-support services to investment advisors who cater to high-net-worth investors. In addition to providing access to managers on its “open architecture” investment platform, it offers investment consulting services, asset-allocation and portfolio-construction tools, best-of-breed manager search and selection and consolidated performance reporting. Fortigent also offers advice on wealth-management solutions such as concentrated- wealth strategies, and access to low-cost portfolio loans.

Gary Carrai, Fortigent’s managing director, says that re-branding Lydian’s advisor service group is meant to “help minimize any potential for conflict between Lydian Wealth Management” and outside advisors who use Fortigent. “As we grow, it will be beneficial to have a separate and independent brand identity for our outsourced wealth management solution.”

Lydian managing director Scott Welch says the potential conflicts the firm seeks to mitigate with the name-change from Lydian Advisor Solutions to Fortigent arise solely from being a unit of a wealth-management firm that supports other wealth managers. “Lydian Wealth Management isn’t a household name yet, but as [we] become better known, we don’t want to put potential [Advisor Solutions] clients in the position having to go to their clients and say that they’ve hooked up with Lydian.”

New clients

Though he says it’s affiliated with four hedge funds, Welch emphasizes that Lydian doesn’t manage money. Nor, he says, do any of its sister companies in the Lydian Trust family.

In any case fear of conflict doesn’t seem to be keeping Fortigent from getting new business. Lydian says the program “has expanded quickly over the past 12 months,” and now boasts more than 20 advisor relationships, which it helps advise on “over $2 billion in collective assets.”

Fortigent’s Carrai notes that the type of client Fortigent works with has changed as well. “Our early partners tended to be independent advisors seeking to upstream their business [models] to high-net-worth clients,” he says. “More recently our partners have tended to be regional banks or larger advisors that already have a high-net-worth client base, but are seeking to complement their existing in-house products and services.”

Among Fortigent’s recently acquired clients are the private-client group of Cleveland-based National City Bank, New York-based accounting firm Weiser’s capital-management unit, and FBR Investment Management, the wealth-management subsidiary of Arlington, Va.-based investment bank Friedman Billings Ramsey.

High end

Lydian says Fortigent owes some of its success to a strategy of sticking to the high end of the market and refusing to go head-to-head with turnkey asset-management programs (TAMPs) – also known as third-part investment platform providers – in a fight for mass-market assets. Some of the bigger third-party providers are Pershing’s Lockwood Advisors, PFPC’s Advisorport, BNP Paribas’ FundQuest and Brinker Capital.

“The TAMP market is extremely competitive and [it’s] dominated by a small handful of players,” says Lydian’s Putterman. “We are in the business of working with high-net-worth families – it’s what we do every day – and we think this is a competitive advantage for our Fortigent partners.”

Carrai supports that view. “We believe that being fellow practitioners in this business is a positive to [the advisors we work with],” he says. “It provides them with a practice management perspective they don’t get from other providers.”

Among other third-party investment platform providers is SunGard Advisor Technologies and independents such as U.S. Fiduciary, GlobalBridge Advisors, Envestnet Asset Management and Advisor Partners. –FWR

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