Lori Van Dusen stepped away from the brokerage environment three years ago when she left CitiGroup Smith Barney to join the institutional group at Convergent Wealth Advisors.
Now, thanks to backing from New York-based Focus Financial Partners, Van Dusen has launching LVW Advisors and is completely independent. The RIA firm will focus on developing comprehensive wealth plans for high-net-worth individuals and family offices, and custom investment management solutions for institutional investors, it announced this week. LVW Advisors will also be a member of New York-based Focus Financial Partners network of firms.
“We can now reach out across the best resources in the industry to augment our capabilities, from our integrated research and analytics to our investment solutions,” Van Dusen said in a statement.
Van Dusen already has a solid industry track record in those areas. She was recently ranked third on Barron’s 2011 list of top women financial advisors. At the time, she had $4.9 billion in listed assets under advisory. Barron’s has also ranked Van Dusen among its America’s Top 100 Financial Advisors for the past eight consecutive years.
Before launching the new firm, Van Dusen had been co-head of Convergent Wealth Advisors’ Institutional Group, where she served on the executive and investment committees. Before that, she was a managing director for CitiGroup Smith Barney’s institutional consulting group.
LVW Advisors gets its start with Richard Van Kuren, who worked with Van Duren at Convergent Wealth Advisors, and will serve as managing partner at the new firm.
“Lori Van Dusen and the team at LVW are truly among the very top institutional and high-net-worth advisors in the country, and we are pleased to have this noteworthy firm as one of our partners,” Rudy Adolf, founder and chief executive officer at Focus Financial Partners said in a statement.
