Hightower hands Dispatch the keys to its data layer

Hightower Advisors has selected Dispatch, a data infrastructure company, to run client data workflows across its Signature Wealth national advisory practice, InvestmentNews reports. The arrangement puts Dispatch at the center of the practice's operational backbone, moving, validating, and synchronizing client records across the custodial platforms and advisory technology systems that include Hightower's existing relationships with both Fidelity and Schwab.

Signature Wealth launched in late 2025 and has already assembled more than 100 advisors managing a combined $35 billion in assets across more than 30 locations, with additional practices expected in the second half of 2026, InvestmentNews reported. That puts the practice inside a much larger balance sheet — Hightower's regulatory filings show $198.6 billion in AUM and more than 220,000 accounts as of late August. The Dispatch agreement covers only the Signature Wealth channel, but it is growing quickly enough that the quality of its data layer will soon be the difference between a firm and a collection of practices.

Larry Restieri, Hightower's chief executive, frames the choice in client-experience terms. "Ultimately, this is about making it easier for our advisors to deliver a great experience to their clients," he told InvestmentNews. "Dispatch provides the data infrastructure that keeps client information accurate and synchronized across the systems that support the relationship, reducing operational friction for advisors and creating a more seamless experience for clients over time."

Dispatch's co-founder and chief operating officer, Madalyn Armijo, draws the sharper strategic line. "Bringing firms together is fundamentally a transaction: the practices share an owner, but may continue operating with different custodians, technology, data conventions and processes," she told InvestmentNews. "Unifying them takes this much further and means making those practices function as one enterprise while preserving the flexibility advisors need."

Armijo argues the industry's delayed focus on unification was not accidental: "The first phase of aggregation was optimized for acquiring firms and preserving their autonomy," she said, which "allowed aggregators to grow quickly and minimized disruption for advisors, but it also created increasingly fragmented operating environments." Historically, integrating those environments meant what she calls "a costly, risky, multiyear rip-and-replace" — a deterrent that kept many firms from attempting it at all.

Now, she argues, the arithmetic has flipped: firms that spent years aggregating have reached a scale where fragmented operations actively limit operating leverage, growth, and client experience. That is the integration phase of RIA M&A, and it validates a case PWD has long made — the battle for advisors has moved to the workflow that moves their accounts, of which Hightower has just bought a serious piece.

The deal also reads as a comment on custody strategy: because Dispatch's remit spans both Fidelity and Schwab, the choice suggests Hightower is not consolidating Signature Wealth onto a single custody desk but building a layer above both platforms instead — a bet that the enterprise value of a multi-custody RIA lives in the synchronization layer rather than in any one custodian relationship. That is a more flexible model than routing everyone onto one platform, and it fits the acquisition-built reality of the practice.

The strategic question for every other aggregator is now explicit: what does your firm actually run on? Firms that built their growth on autonomy are sitting on environments made of different custodians, different CRMs, and different data conventions, and the ones that treat integration as a someday project will keep paying for that fragmentation in manual work, error rates, and advisors who notice when a client record is wrong. The firms that treat data infrastructure as a balance-sheet asset — as Hightower just did — have a better answer to the question the next seller should ask before taking the check.

The buyer pool has shortened, the financing math has tightened, and the firms left standing have to operate what they bought. Hightower has written a check that says it understands the assignment. The next cohort of practices, expected in the second half of 2026, will be the first to test whether Dispatch's layer makes joining Signature Wealth feel like joining a firm rather than a holding company — the standard by which the deal should be judged.