Hightower hires Vanguard's De Freitas, and the mandate is integration

Hightower Advisors has hired Marco De Freitas, until recently Vanguard's head of digital and analytics, as its next president effective in the middle of the fourth quarter, WealthManagement.com reported. He reports to chief executive Larry Restieri and takes operations, technology, enterprise AI strategy and the investment platform; the role came open in June when Roberto Stewart stepped down, less than three months after taking it.

The résumé is the mandate. De Freitas spent a decade at TD Ameritrade running digital, client experience, investment products and advice before moving to Vanguard, and what he inherits is plumbing rather than pitching. Restieri's statement describes a firm working to connect its own resources and make it easier for advisors to bring "the full breadth of our capabilities to clients," which is the vocabulary of an acquirer turning to the pieces it already owns.

PWD's records put Hightower at $198.6 billion in regulatory assets, 1,983 employees and 220,222 accounts, a base that turns platform and operations calls into firm-level strategy. Giving the number-two executive an enterprise AI mandate is the tell: for a firm that size, the bottleneck has shifted from finding sellers to absorbing them.

The division news released alongside the hire runs the same way: Jennifer Frazier, a partner at Hightower Signature Wealth, becomes president of that unit, which has passed $40 billion in AUM. Signature Wealth launched last October as the firm's branded RIA, seeded by Dallas-based Frontier Investment Management, the partner firm Frazier came from. Mike Hirsbrunner, also from Frontier, is its new chief operating officer, and Penny Phillips continues as head of advisor growth. The unit added Stearns Financial Group last month, an affiliate with a 30-person team and about $2.5 billion in client assets.

Our September coverage of Hightower's Signature Wealth arrangement with Dispatch called it a bet that RIA M&A's next phase runs on integration. Installing a digital-and-analytics operator one rung below the CEO escalates that bet, and it lines up with the argument about the C-suite version of the advisor talent war. The executives who own distribution, recruiting and planning are the scarce hire now, not the books. Hightower is buying the promise it makes to sellers — that a partner firm's back office gets faster after the deal closes.

De Freitas starts at the middle of the fourth quarter, and the measure of the hire will not be his headcount but the speed at which Hightower's next partner firm shows up on the parent's platform.