Professor Nicole Boyson is latest academic to enter the planning field

A college professor whose research on industry fees and witty yet substantive tweets have gained notice in wealth management joined a new advisory firm.

Nicole Boyson, a finance professor at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business, announced on Twitter last month that she had joined Boston-based LongView Investment Advisors part-time alongside her longtime friend Chuck Brown and former Fidelity Investments Vice Chairman Bob Pozen. 

Nicole Boyson

"I like the idea of trying to serve individuals and trying to find ways to do that that are full-service but not cost-prohibitive," she said in an interview. "I'm not looking to build a massive book of business. It's something I like to do, and it's something I do one-off helping friends make decisions. So it makes sense to take the next step and do it as a formal role."

LongView's Brown shares Boyson's views that wealth managers should charge low fees and avoid conflicts of interest. With the move, Boyson is returning to the industry she left for academia more than two decades ago, a path taken by several professors who have become planners and vice versa. 

Besides fruitful areas for research such as the relationship between planning and psychology, professor-advisors say the dual roles are beneficial to their clients, students and professional development. Boyson will remain chair of her department while assisting with the practice's research and client development and picking up about five to 10 customers of her own.

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Brown, a 20-year industry veteran with mostly nonprofit clients, launched LongView in August through a registered investment advisor named Integrated Advisors Network, which provides operational services to independently-owned practices. He declined to state the number of clients or amount of assets managed by the practice, saying only that the amount of assets is in the nine figures. Brown left his prior firm, DHK Financial Advisors, to open LongView. 

Pozen is the former chairman of MFS Investment Management, one of the oldest U.S. mutual fund companies in the world, and a former president of Fidelity Investments. A pioneer of donor-advised funds, he's also a former SEC official, the onetime Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Affairs under Gov. Mitt Romney, the co-author of a tome on the asset management industry and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Brown said in an interview that he and Boyson had spoken about teaming up in the past, and that earlier this year he asked her to come aboard the new firm.

Chuck Brown

Much of Boyson's research "has to do with conflicts of interest and behavior and the ethics of investing," Brown said, adding that the two of them are "so like-minded" on those topics. "I've found it very hard to find advisors or advisory firms who believe similar things, and, for Niki and I, it's almost to a T."

At least two other advisor-professors said they also stepped into the field after starting in academia, where college planning programs are ramping up their industry partnerships. Nandita Das, the director of the planning program at Delaware State University and the founder of Das Financial Health, and Kashif Ahmed, a lecturer in finance at Suffolk University and the president of American Private Wealth, both said they entered the field when they didn't receive the level of service they expected as clients. 

The dual roles are "a two-way street" enhancing each other, Das said. She was speaking on the phone from one of the many industry conferences she and her students have attended together this fall.

"When you do what you're passionate about, you find time for it," she said. "Because I am an advisor, I also attend some advisor-only events. That makes my network larger. That helps my students."

Ahmed sees many similarities between explaining concepts to students and clients, noting that "what I really relish is the education and the teaching part" of planning.

"I try to teach them why we are doing the financial planning process," he said. "I am at heart a teacher, whether I'm teaching in the classroom or teaching a client."

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Boyson's more than 8,300 followers on Twitter can gain a sense of her passion for teaching, view adorable pictures of her young cat Maurice and learn from detailed threads about her research. One of Boyson's current working papers, which follows her studies of hedge fund activism, regulatory arbitrage, financial crises and mutual funds, found that dual-registered advisors charge higher fees than those registered solely as brokers or RIA-only planners. 

At LongView, Boyson is studying for her Series 65 examination next month and helping the practice with client presentations and requests-for-proposal processes at nonprofits. It's her first foray directly into the field since she worked at Ernst & Young's RIA in the late '90s.

"It's exciting to be associated with the two of them," she said of Brown and Pozen. "It's a fun way to think about building out a really nice business."