Banking for breakaways with the conflict removed

When the biggest wirehouse teams migrate into independent RIA firms, they leave a gap where the bank used to be: the mortgage, the securities line, the art loan, the private checking account that came with the job. Break away, and an advisor does not just leave the broker-dealer; the client's entire banking relationship has to be moved by hand—what Fieldpoint Private's Mike White calls pulling the cord out of the wall.

Max, the cash management technology firm for independent RIAs, and Fieldpoint Private, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based private commercial bank, have now launched Benchmark, a turnkey private banking platform for independent RIAs and their clients, after two years of conversation between the firms and with the launch reported by InvestmentNews. The platform includes high-performance checking and savings accounts with FDIC insurance well above the norm, plus bespoke private client lending—mortgages, securities-based lending, and loans against art, collectibles, and aircraft. Fieldpoint had already divested its own wealth management business.

The driver, White said, has been the migration of advisors from wirehouses, where banking services were built into the client relationship, into independence, where the imperative to fully cut the cord suddenly includes moving clients out of the legacy firm's bank. A Cerulli survey cited in the announcement finds 83% of wirehouse advisors consider access to high-net-worth services, including private banking, an advantage of their current firm, and 88% say the same about lending products—confirmation both that the bank is a retention tool inside wirehouses and that a breakaway team has to rebuild it to feel whole.

The natural answer would be for an RIA to outsource banking to a conventional private bank, but most private banks run their own wealth management businesses, and an independent RIA that hands its clients to one of them takes on a competitor. That conflict of interest has kept private banking largely out of the RIA channel, which is why the wirehouse banking relationship has been so hard to replace: the institutions with the balance sheets and the lending expertise are the same institutions that want to manage the family money. The RIA channel has grown comfortable outsourcing custody, trading, and even private credit to third parties; banking has been the exception, because the counterparty always seemed to want the same client.

Fieldpoint's answer is unusual. The bank made a conscious decision to divest out of wealth management so it could focus on providing banking capabilities to other RIAs. That turns the platform into something closer to a utility: the bank exists to be the RIA's banking layer, with no wealth arm to tempt it later. Max founder and CEO Gary Zimmerman told InvestmentNews he is not aware of anything else in the market that can deliver all of this in one package.

The divestiture is what makes the platform credible: Fieldpoint could have kept a white-label wealth arm and called it independent, but instead removed the channel conflict at the entity level, becoming a vendor rather than a rival and setting a template for any institution that wants to serve RIAs without competing against them. The trade-off is the bank's own wealth management revenue, surrendered in exchange for the RIA channel.

The turnkey pitch addresses a friction the RIA channel knows well: a team that wants to offer clients a securities-based line and an aircraft loan currently has to source each product from a separate lender, or lean on a custodian's referral network, and Benchmark packages them under one platform with a single private bank as the counterparty. The elevated FDIC coverage speaks to the wealthy-client book, where cash balances can exceed standard insurance limits. The package also solves a recruiting problem: a team that carries its banking relationships into the RIA is less likely to be pulled back to a wirehouse, where the bank was a standard part of the offer.

The structure is credible because Fieldpoint has already made the irreversible move, but the open question is whether breakaway teams, schooled for years to treat private banks as a threat, will believe a bank that has divested its wealth arm can stay out of the wealth business and stick with the RIA. The platform's success will be measured not by the announcement but by the first teams that move their clients' checking, lending, and securities lines onto it. The announcement names no founding RIAs, which makes the adoption test even cleaner: Benchmark has to win clients on the structure alone.

This publication has argued that the platform race is moving past custody and into services. Schwab's $5 million referral bar turned the RIA referral program into a high-net-worth introduction service and exposed how dependent independent firms are on custodian leads. Benchmark is the banking entry in that same contest, with the conflict addressed at the structural level. Every private bank that wants to serve the RIA channel will now have to answer the question Fieldpoint has answered: are you willing to give up your wealth management business to keep ours? The ones that say no will still be lenders with a conflict attached.

The tell will come when a rival private bank announces it is shedding its own wealth arm to pursue RIA clients. At that point, the wirehouse bank will have been successfully recreated in the independent model, and the old wirehouse banking advantage will have stopped being a reason to stay. The next bank to make that announcement is worth watching.