Hightower splits the rollup from the growth unit to court a buyer

Hightower has split the top of its operating chart in two, handing the presidency of the $300 billion rollup business to Marco De Freitas, an executive RIABiz counts as arriving from Vanguard. Jennifer Frazier, already a Hightower partner, takes the presidency of Hightower Signature Wealth, the $40 billion unit the firm stood up internally inside the past year, and both jobs answer to one brief: kindle buyer interest without a conglomerate discount.

A buyer pricing Hightower today has to underwrite a leveraged acquisition machine and a year-old single-system RIA in a single check, and the premise of the exercise—a conglomerate discount RIABiz names outright—is that the parts are worth more apart than together. Splitting the operating leadership is the cheapest way to make them legible before anyone opens a data room. Two presidents is not a succession plan; it is two prospectuses. On the logic of the exercise, they are likely aimed at different buyers: a scale acquirer that will pay for $300 billion of assets assembled through acquisitions, and someone willing to pay for a $40 billion book that grows.

De Freitas reports to chief executive Larry Restieri and arrives in the middle of the fourth quarter, which RIABiz places in November, with a remit covering operations, technology, enterprise AI strategy and the investment platform. Frazier's promotion mostly formalizes oversight she was already carrying while running sales inside Signature, which had no president at all between its internal launch and this week.

Hightower is the $350 billion story, the rollup $300 billion, Signature more than $40 billion, and the coverage does not say where the remaining $10 billion sits. Even Restieri's own figure for Signature—more than $40 billion in assets in less than a year—arrives carrying an asterisk nothing in the coverage resolves. For a firm whose pitch depends on a buyer trusting the parts, a gap in the accounting and an unexplained footnote are the first things a diligence call asks about.

Hightower has been through this before: RIABiz notes the last president came and went quickly, and that settling a final, starting C-suite lineup has itself complicated the revamp. Splitting the chair rather than refilling it suggests the firm concluded there is no single operator's job left to fill, which is a fair read of a company running two businesses at different speeds.

The roster RIABiz describes supports that read, counting the leadership as alumni of Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, State Street and, with De Freitas, Vanguard, and framing the revamp as a prelude to a sale through Restieri's recent employer, Goldman Sachs. That last piece is a columnist's read on a plan rather than a disclosed process; the coverage does not describe a signed engagement.

De Freitas fits the pattern more tightly than the title suggests: eight years at McKinsey and a decade at TD Ameritrade running digital, client experience, investment products and advice is a systems résumé, the kind a company buys when the constraint is integration rather than recruiting. The AI line in his remit points the same way. The contest over AI in wealth is a data-governance fight for the reconciled client record, not a model race, and Hightower has placed enterprise AI strategy under the president who also owns operations and technology—where the problem presents first in a book assembled through acquisitions.

Signature is the cleaner asset, and the one that could travel alone: grown to more than $40 billion in under a year, it is a single-system book with one platform and one P&L, the kind of thing a buyer can underwrite without also taking on the acquisition machine that built the rest of the firm.

Except the growth has not all been built: PWD's records show Hightower Signature Wealth logging a $275 million team liftout in August and a deal announcement on Sept. 1, with the parent announcing another deal on Sept. 24. Recruited assets have carried as much of the Hightower story as bought ones: in August, Merit and Hightower together pulled nearly $5 billion from LPL's future book. Each fresh announcement re-labels the enterprise as a rollup with a growth unit attached.

RIABiz frames the task as the trick facing every rollup of that vintage: cut the dependence on deals without cutting off asset growth. United Capital, Focus Financial and, to a degree, Corient are all somewhere in the same reinvention, and by August the talent war had moved to the C-suite. Hightower's version is to hire executives who can re-cut the boxes while the deal tape keeps running, and that tension is what a buyer will price.

The test now runs on the deal tape rather than the org chart. A quarter in which Signature adds advisors and assets with no acquisition attached does more for a sale multiple than any title in this week's release; a fresh announcement does the reverse. Restieri has assembled the résumés, but what he has not yet published is a quarter of growth a buyer can price without the machine.