Dynasty hires Scott D. Welch to be chief investment officer

Dynasty Financial Partners, a company that sells advisers services and tools to run their businesses, has hired Scott D. Welch for its new position as chief investment officer. In his new role, Mr. Welch will oversee investment research, choose research partners and select portfolio managers. His work will be made available to advisory firms already a part of Dynasty's Network to improve their investment options. Mr. Welch will report to Todd Thomson, chairman and head of the investments committee at Dynasty. “We've done our best to stay up with the trends, but that's one of the main reasons we hired Scott,” said Mr. Thompson, who acted as an interim CIO. Dynasty has commercial relationships with 28 firms, though that number is expected to be closer to 40 by the end of the year. The company has been expanding the services and tools it can offer its adviser partners. Earlier this year, it picked up a former Merrill Lynch director to help advisers form acquisitions Mr. Welch's aim in particular will be to help advisers with the investments management portion of their businesses. “My job is to take the information and data that Dynasty receives and apply a layer of intellectual capital so it fits in the needs of the growing community base,” Mr. Welch said. He added that this can be done in three ways: By making sure the offering fits the needs of the adviser base; innovating and evolving over time; and educating the wealth management community about the benefits of using solutions like Dynasty. “We actually believe advisers are better off outsourcing a lot of that capability to the Dynasty investment platform,” Mr. Thomson said. “We would expect to see over time that a lot of advisers continue to leverage the investment platform, and Scott will be a critical part of and give some more flexibility and scalability on building business.” Prior to joining Dynasty, Mr. Welch was at a wealth management consulting firm he founded called UnconstrainedThought. From 1998 to 2014, he was executive vice president and chief investment officer of Fortigent, a firm he co-founded,which was bought by LPL Financial in 2012. In that job he oversaw investment and research. For twelve years before joining Fortigent, he focused on capital markets, risk management and relationship management on Wall Street, first at Swiss Bank Corp. and then at The Globecon Group. An earlier version of this story misstated the date when LPL Financial bought Fortigent. It was 2012, not earlier this year.