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Three lead advisors from a $10 billion bank wealth team have broken away to form a fee-only registered investment advisor, Prairie View Wealth Partners, in Sioux Falls, S.D., with Raymond James as its custodian.
Co-founders Adam Cox, Kyle Cipperley and Paula Bindert previously held senior roles at The First National Bank in Sioux Falls. They have backgrounds in wealth management, investment strategy, family office advising and tax planning, which they’ll use to seek out individual and family clients.
Cox, who had been chief wealth management officer at First National, said the chance to own and run their own practice, along with the flexibility of decision-making for clients, eventually made the move a “no-brainer.”
“We’d been looking out at the wealth management space and seeing how much innovation and capital are going toward the independent space,” he said. “At this stage of our careers, we liked the prospect of owning our business and having total control and autonomy over that and building it from the ground up.”
Cox, Cipperley and Bindert are the co-owners of the new RIA, which Cox said aims to reach about $250 million in client assets by the end of this year. Cox and Cipperley had been with First National Bank for over a decade, and Bindert had been there about four years, according to LinkedIn.
Another draw for the move was the opportunity to offer clients tax planning via Bindert, who had operated her own tax practice, as the team sees tax planning as an increasingly important part of financial advice.
“There is a lot of space for firms that want to lead with tax planning … there are a lot of advisors that just tell clients to go talk to their CPA,” he said. “We feel clients are gravitating more toward a full-service model, and they want their advisors to do more than we’ve ever been able to do.”
Beyond that, he said the firm is looking forward to doing more “bespoke” investment work with clients and to otherwise lean into client service and experience.
“There are many things in wealth management that can be commoditized, with the exception of the way that you make people feel,” he said. “We will borrow from the best practices of leading hospitality brands to create a unique feeling when you work with us.”
First National did not respond to a request for comment on the breakaway advisors. It has six wealth advisors along with 16 other team members across trust, portfolio management, and client services, according to its website.
Prairie View is not abandoning banking altogether. Cox said the team chose Raymond James as its custodian partly because of its banking services.
“We were coming out of a banking model,” Cox said, “A lot of our clients needed banking services, and as we looked around, we loved that Raymond James had a bank that served the wealth management client and not the other way around.”
The new RIA is using WealthBox as its customer relationship management platform, Holistiplan and Vanilla for estate and tax, and Exhibit A for client presentations, Cox said.
He said the team would be taking a “measured approach” to its technology stack.
“We want to start here and master these rather than looking at more shiny new tools,” he said. “We’d rather spend that time working on clients.”
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