This is a remarkable homecoming for Matthew Stahr, the newly appointed president of De Waay Financial Network and De Waay Advisory, the sibling of Clive, Iowa companies that provide brokerage and investment advisory services to clients.
In that job, Stahr is responsible for expanding the company’s fleet of advisors and boosting its average advisor production. Right now, De Waay’s average advisor production falls between $700,000 and $750,000, and the company’s leadership would like to boost that average to about $1 million. Like a lot of other financial advisory firms targeting the very wealthy, the De Waay companies hope to do that by creating top-flight services for sophisticated, high-net-worth investors, and get bigger shares of their clients’ money management business.
“We’ll offer a service model that from a client standpoint is … relationship first,” Stahr said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “That means being with the client at all times, as opposed to only when they need to purchase a product.”
Stahr joined the company in July as its vice president and chief marketing officer. Four months might seem like a short incubation period to transform a CMO into a president, but Stahr has had a lot of hands-on experience building out broker-dealer businesses. He first cut his teeth in the brokerage channel in the early 1990s, when he was a chief operations officer for Beneficial Investment Services. At the time the registered representatives were doing business through a broker-dealer platform outside the company. After joining the Beneficial team, Stahr helped create an internal broker dealer platform so that its registered reps could do business on the company’s own platform.
After that, he did marketing and recruiting work as vice president and chief marketing officer of Sammons Securities Co., “the dark side,” he joked. All kidding aside, that experience furthered his education about the tools and processes that broker-dealer platforms have to have in order to keep advisors and their clients happy.
“We are dedicated to bringing top talent to our organization that will lead us into the future,” Don De Waay, chairman of De Waay Financial Network, said in a statement. “Matt brings an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, experience, and superior service to our organization.”
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Nationwide Financial Services, Inc., based in Columbus, Ohio, has hired Eric Stevenson as vice president and chief sales officer for Nationwide Retirement Solutions, its public-sector retirement plans subsidiary. Previously, Stevenson was vice president of marketing for its retirement plans business.
New York Life Insurance Co., based in New York City, has hired John Fleurant as senior vice president of finance and controller. In those roles, Fleurant will be responsible for financial planning, accounting policy and rating agency relationships. Fleurant had been controller at Prudential Financial, and he had also been a senior manager for Deloitte & Touche, where he spent nine years.
