Willow Street impressed with platform builder's research and due diligence. De novo multifamily office Willow Street Advisors has turned to wealth-management platform consultancy Fortigent to augment its in-house investment-management offerings.

"We're very confident in our proprietary management, but our job is provide our clients with the best advice we can give them -- so on the investment-management side we want to be able to provide open architecture," says Willow Street co-founder and managing director Christopher Bray. "Fortigent provides access to outstanding alternative and traditional managers, excellent market research and really painstaking manager due diligence -- which of course is vital in light of the Madoff scandal."

Research

Naples, Fla.-based Willow Street is less than a month old. Five of its seven-member staff worked at Cleveland, Ohio-based National City's Private Client Group -- and three of them, Bray included, spent time at Sterling, National City's multifamily office.

(Pittsburgh-based PNC acquired National City at the end of 2008. As a result, it's generally reckoned that Sterling will be folded into PNC's multifamily office Hawthorn.)

Willow Street combines comprehensive investment-advisory services with family-office services such as income-tax planning and compliance, wealth-transfer tax planning, estate planning and succession planning. With most of its early clients coming from its principals' previous financial-service contacts and from the law firm Kearns Bray, which is operated by Bray and Willow Street managing director David Kearns, the firm expects to manage about $200 million in client assets by the end of March.

Bray says he and his colleagues knew of Fortigent as a long-time investment-platform provider to National City. When it came time to pick an open-architecture provider for Willow Street, they set out to find a less expensive alternative to Fortigent, but came up short.

"Fortigent isn't cheap, but we couldn't find anyone who does anything similar," says Bray. "Like I said, their research function is very strong."

Rockville, Md.-based Fortigent has more than 50 institutional clients and -- as of a few months ago, anyway -- more than $20 billion in end-client assets on its platform. -FWR

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