Two veteran JPMorgan Chase wealth advisors have left the bank with roughly $18.6 billion in client assets to start their own independent wealth firm, effectively making one of the largest wirehouse breakaways of recent years.
On Monday, Jim Atwood and Phil Scott announced the launch of Latigo Peak Partners, a new firm they're launching together after running two of the largest practices at JPMorgan Advisors, Atwood’s in Boston and Scott’s in Bellevue, Washington.
Based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Latigo Peak is opening with a superteam of 48 professionals serving ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families. As an RIA, the firm is registered with regulators as a fiduciary that gives investment advice for a fee, rather than earning commissions as a broker.
The scale of the move reflects how the practice grew while it sat inside the bank. Over the past six years, the two advisors raised their combined revenue from $34 million to more than $130 million, according to the firm’s launch announcement.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Atwood said the bank’s structure had come to limit how they could invest for clients.
“If you’re working within one of these firms, you’re confined to investment opportunities on their platform,” Atwood said. “It gets difficult to be as nimble as you want.”
The decision to self-fund sets Latigo Peak apart in a market where outside money usually pays for growth or startup costs. Private equity backed 88% of RIA deals in 2025, according to a Fidelity Investments report cited by Bloomberg. That share has held steady this year: PE-backed and PE-owned buyers accounted for 89% of RIA transactions in the first half of 2026, according to Fidelity’s midyear figures.
Atwood said the firm had other options and turned them down because of the exit timelines that come with that capital.
“We had a lot of opportunities out there to partner with PE – but when you partner with another firm ... they’re going to want to get out in five or six years. They’re going to have an idea of how to manage the business,” he told Bloomberg.
“Phil and I are backing this 100% ourselves, which is a big differentiator,” he added. “It’s not cheap to do that.”
Scott described the independence as a matter of control.
“Independence gives us the ability to take responsibility for the future of our business and make decisions based on what we believe is right for our clients over the long term,” he said in the launch announcement.
Like many RIA firms, Latigo Peak will use more than one custodian, selecting Charles Schwab and BNY Pershing for custody and lending. Fusion Financial Partners advised on the design and launch of the RIA.
Alongside the Florida headquarters, the firm has operational hubs in Bellevue and Boston and a field office in Los Angeles. Scott told Bloomberg the firm is weighing offices in Denver and Jackson Hole, Wyoming within the next year, and pointed to rising wealth management demand in the Palm Beach market.
“A lot of people are starting to have liquidity events — there wasn’t nearly as much M&A activity five years ago as there is today,” Scott said.
Investing will center on public equities and fundamental research. Around that core, the firm will offer family-office services including estate and wealth planning, gifting, philanthropic strategy and education for clients’ heirs.
Atwood estimated that more than 95% of new business comes through word-of-mouth referrals, according to Bloomberg.
Atwood, 65, and Scott, 71, both started their careers at Merrill Lynch and later moved to First Republic, which JPMorgan acquired in 2023. Their firm takes its name in part from Latigo, a ski run at Colorado’s Beaver Creek resort, where the two met 35 years ago.
The launch adds to a run of large teams leaving bank-owned brokerages, and the major firms have started to respond. UBS has raised payouts for its U.S. advisors after a series of high-profile departures, reworking its 2026 advisor pay plan to add a new tier for advisors generating $20 million or more in annual revenue.
The most high-profile example came a little over a year ago when OpenArc Corporate Advisory, a team that managed $129 billion at Merrill Lynch, went independent with a minority investment from Dynasty Financial Partners. Merrill Lynch filed a federal lawsuit in the wake of the move, alleging a coordinated raid, though OpenArc disputed the claims in court.
Around that time, Dynasty CEO Shirl Penney told InvestmentNews that the sheer scale of the move would encourage other breakaways.
"[A]ny advisor who might still be in some form of captivity or feeling trapped and looking to get liberated if you will, can look at this and say if they can do it, then I can do it,” Penney said.
Latigo Peak’s founders say they are building for the long term. “We’ve been doing this for 40 years, and plan on going for another 20 years,” Atwood told Bloomberg. “We want to build a family legacy business.”
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