TradePMR product chief Jon Patullo joins CG Financial as COO and CIO

Jon Patullo, who joined TradePMR in 2024 as chief product officer with a mandate to grow the custodian's Fusion technology platform, has moved to CG Financial Services as chief operating officer and chief information officer, leaving TradePMR roughly two years into the Fusion assignment. CG, a hybrid registered investment advisor with $5 billion in assets under management, puts the operating model, digital capabilities, advisor workflows, and scalable processes under him, and says it will draw on the vendor relationships he built on the other side of the table.

That vendor map carries particular weight for an RIA that has run its custody and brokerage business on LPL Financial's rails since 2023, and the firm expects to draw on Patullo's experience developing vendor relationships as it continues to invest in its technology platform. Patullo spent his career on the other side of that table: chief product officer at Apex Fintech Solutions before TradePMR, and more than 16 years running advisor technology development at TD Ameritrade Institutional, including the rollouts of Veo and Veo Open Access. For a firm that built its network to help advisors leave large brokerage firms, the vendor map in his head is a real asset.

Operators who have worked the vendor side of advisor technology are a specific kind of hire. LPL went outside banking for the same profile in August, naming Wells Fargo's tech chief, Jonathan Lewis, as its chief technology officer for the Latitude platform push, as this publication reported at the time. A custodian hired a bank's engineer and a $5 billion RIA hired a custodian's product executive, but both rest on the same wager: that the workflows, integrations, and operating discipline an advisor works inside set loyalty, not the clearing relationship underneath.

Anthony J. Mazzali and a group of captive advisors founded the firm in Haslett, Mich., in 1999, after concluding independent advisors wanted help running their practices, not just a place to clear trades. CG Advisor Network grew out of that as a platform and back-office support system for advisors leaving large firms. Since moving to LPL for custody and brokerage services in 2023, the firm has kept hiring into the network, bringing in Eugene "Gino" DeRango—previously a senior vice president and national sales manager at Axos Advisor Services—as director of CG Advisor Network last year.

This week, CG Advisory Services, the firm's RIA unit, launched its first exchange-traded fund, the CG Flagship Equity ETF, applying the firm's equity selection process—a top-down approach that combines fundamental research, a capitalization framework, and value analysis—to a list of roughly 100 to 125 companies. The fund and the operations hire run in the same direction: a mid-sized firm trying to own the advisor relationship, the back office behind it, and the product the advisor puts clients into. The advisor access point is the gatekeeper for product flow, and CG is buying that position with people rather than acquisitions.

The sequence—LPL in 2023, DeRango last year, the fund this week, the combined operations and technology hire now—is what a back-office provider looks like when it decides to become a platform, and it drops a lot of weight on one executive. CG is betting that its operating model and technology stack are one problem, a reasonable bet and an unusual one to place in a single hire. Whether one operator carries both seats while the firm recruits advisors and stands up a product shelf is the open question; the report does not say how the duties will be split.

TradePMR answered the succession question by pointing to an appointment it made in May. Asked about a replacement for Patullo, a spokesperson referred to the May 2026 appointment of Kate Mapstone, a strategic advisor at Robinhood, as head of RIA strategy, noting that she has since overseen the rollout of Robinhood Cortex for Advisors and Advisor IPO Access and that she leads the strategic vision and roadmap for the dual-custody platform. The custodian is, in effect, telling advisors that its RIA strategy and product roadmap are now the same job, and that the roadmap runs through Robinhood. The same dependency is under test elsewhere: the $3.38 billion former Wells Fargo team behind Gryphon is testing whether an RIA can outsource its technology to its custodian and still own the client.

The week's other moves are conventional and, for that reason, easier to price. Voya Financial's chief investment officer, Eric Stein, will leave in November, a little over a year after being promoted into the role, according to a regulatory filing the firm confirmed; Voya's most recent entry in PWD's tracking is a $4.3 billion deal announced in August. Larry Roth, an industry veteran, has joined the board of Wealthstream, an AI-driven advisor intelligence firm—a governance seat at a business selling into the advisor channel, with nothing in the report about what the appointment is meant to do. And Alaris has hired a buyer strategist away from SageView, the kind of hire that suggests the binding constraint in consolidation is sourcing deals rather than funding them.

None of these moves will show up in an asset total, which is the awkward thing about platform hiring: the results arrive as retention and recruiting, rarely with one number attached to one name. The next group of advisors each side signs is where the two judgments first become legible—whether a custodian's product chief can run a $5 billion operating model, and whether TradePMR's roadmap was already in place.