Brookwood Investment Group, a Phoenix-based registered investment advisor that has nearly tripled its assets in two years, has selected Amplify Technology to build a unified data platform underpinning onboarding, trading, reporting, billing and governance for its advisor network.
The new Brookwood Intelligence Platform folds Brookwood's previously scattered systems into a single data layer built on Amplify's architecture.
Brookwood has grown from $515 million to more than $1.5 billion in assets over the past two years and now supports more than 75 advisors and roughly 6,200 clients, according to the announcement of its partnership with Amplify. That growth has happened under a model Brookwood calls its Professional Advisor Partnership, part of the growing field of support platforms that let entrepreneurial advisors retain independence while drawing on a larger institution's infrastructure and expertise.
Amplify chief marketing officer Jack Martin said Brookwood's approach to scaling made it a natural fit for the platform.
"They're growing quickly, but they're also being very deliberate about the kind of institution they want to build around their advisors," Martin said. "That requires a connected data foundation that can turn information into intelligence, deploy AI safely on trusted data, and give advisors greater capability."
Brookwood co-founder and chief executive Kimberley Raimondo said the firm wasn't shopping for another point solution when it began the search.
"We were looking for infrastructure that could support what we believe wealth management should become," Raimondo said, adding that Amplify "understood our vision and had built the platform from the advisor's point of view."
As part of the buildout, Brookwood has also added a wave of executive hires, including president Claire Alexander, chief operating officer Jasmine Yu, chief growth officer Michael Jones, and chief financial officer and head of institutional operations Jeff Williams.
According to a Brookwood announcement earlier this month, and as confirmed by the executives' LinkedIn profiles, Alexander previously founded and led RIA consultancy Arch's Anvil, while Jones has held roles at BlackRock, TD Ameritrade Institutional and AssetMark.
Early in his career, Williams held senior positions at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citi before moving into hedge fund finance leadership. Yu joins from e3 Wealth, where she served as chief operating officer, after earlier operations roles at Kestra Private Wealth Services.
The Brookwood deal lands amid a run of partnership announcements for Amplify, the Scottsdale-based, AI-native platform built on data lake architecture. Earlier this summer, the firm unveiled a Custody Command Layer built with Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions to speed account opening for growth-minded RIAs.
Earlier this month, it rolled out a turnkey managed portfolio partnership with Ned Davis Research covering trading, rebalancing and reporting. Those additions followed last year's debut of QuantumRisk, a risk-scoring tool built by Amplify's investment research director to help RIAs plan for market shocks that traditional models tend to treat as improbable.
According to a recent research report by Cerulli, more than 80% of billion-dollar RIA executives see advisor time constraints as a challenge to implementing organic growth strategies, and just 14% of RIAs overall use a dedicated marketing resource.
Cerulli's research also found that firms managing $1 billion or more increasingly rely on referrals from clients, friends and family – cited by 93% of billion-dollar RIA executives – while contending with the operational strain of scaling advisor teams without adding proportional headcount.
At firms hat have cleared the billion-dollar milestone, Cerulli's research suggests the average advisor is strapped for time to support firm growth, committing just 7% of their week on new client prospecting.
"After accounting for market performance, true RIA expansion rates have averaged a middling 3%-4% annually," the Cerulli report said, referring to RIA growth rates at large. "This 3%–4%
growth becomes even more concerning when considering both merger and acquisition (M&A) activity as well as breakaways launching new RIAs."
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