Kurt MacAlpine

He was born and raised in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.⁠[1][2][3][4]

The ages printed in various places are: WisdomTree Investments’ proxy statement dated April 30, 2019, gives him as 37; The Globe and Mail’s profile of January 7, 2020, gives 38, and a later long article in the same paper describes him as 38 when he was hired as chief executive of CI Financial; CI Financial’s management information circular dated May 5, 2020, gives 38; RIABiz gives 39 in its article of November 18, 2020; BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry gives 41 in its article of August 30, 2022; and RIABiz gives 44 in its article of September 4, 2025.⁠[5][1][2][6][7][8][9]

He received a Bachelor of Commerce from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia (the programme of the university’s convocation of October 27, 2002, lists him under Bachelor of Commerce, with “Saint John, NB” as his home), and an MBA from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; The Globe and Mail writes that he completed the MBA at Queen’s University before landing a job with McKinseyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry in New York.⁠[5][3][10][1][11]

WisdomTree Investments’ 2019 proxy statement states that he was employed at McKinsey & Company from May 2006 to June 2015 in a variety of consulting roles, was elected a partner in April 2013 and was leader of the firm’s North American Asset Management Practice. CI Financial’s press release states that he was based in the New York office and managed global consulting teams that advised clients in the asset and wealth management industries on strategy, distribution, marketing, international expansion, mergers and acquisitions and product development; the proxy statement adds that he has extensive experience working with domestic and foreign firms in North America, Asia and Europe.⁠[5][3][12]

Consulting.ca writes that he spent nine years at the firm; RIABiz writes that he joined McKinsey in his mid-20s, stayed nine years and had been named partner by the age of 30; he himself said, in the conversation published in 2026, that he had spent 10 years as a management consultant.⁠[12][7][4]

CI Financial’s press release states that in July 2015 he joined WisdomTree Asset Management, a global asset manager and sponsor of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based in New York, as executive vice-president and head of global distribution, responsible for all global client-facing functions, overseeing most of its international businesses and sitting on its global executive management committee; CI Financial’s management information circular adds that he sat on the boards of several of its international entities. WisdomTree Investments’ proxy statement gives him as Executive Vice President and Global Head of Distribution since July 2015 and, from November 2016, also a member of the board of directors of AdvisorEngine. The Globe and Mail’s profile instead gives 2016 as the year he joined.⁠[3][6][5][12][1]

Consulting.ca writes that he spent four years at WisdomTree overseeing distribution, business development, marketing, data intelligence and client solutions, and that in those years he partnered with IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry Watson on predictive analytics, built an advisor solutions program and redesigned client coverage. CI Financial’s press release states that clients who adopted these new initiatives generated organic growth rates for WisdomTree of about 20%, multiples higher than the legacy approach. The Globe and Mail writes that he largely oversaw WisdomTree’s international expansion from 2015, including its launch in Canada. He himself said that he spent four to four and a half years as an operator inside an asset management business.⁠[12][3][13][4]

The summary compensation table of WisdomTree Investments’ 2019 proxy statement lists his pay for 2016 to 2018: a total of US$1,368,995 for 2016 (salary US$300,000, bonus US$360,000, stock awards US$699,995), US$1,823,995 for 2017 (salary US$300,000, bonus US$975,000, stock awards US$539,995) and US$1,274,243 for 2018 (salary US$375,000, bonus US$365,000, stock awards US$524,993); the proxy statement’s ownership table shows him as the beneficial owner of 295,221 shares of the company, 181,734 of them restricted stock.⁠[5]

On August 6, 2019, Toronto-based CI Financial Corp. announced that its board had appointed him chief executive officer and a director, effective September 1, 2019, succeeding Peter Anderson, who had announced in April 2019 that he would retire no later than mid-2020 and who stayed on in the short term to help with the transition. The release gives CI’s fee-earning assets as about C$177 billion at July 31, 2019, and states that he would work alongside Darie Urbanky, recently appointed president and chief operating officer. In the release the director David Miller said: “Kurt brings to CI a powerful combination of strategic thinking, innovation, and operational experience”; he himself called CI “an iconic and unique company in this market.”⁠[3][14]

Explaining the choice of an outsider, Bill Holland (William T. Holland), the chair and a former chief executive, said: “We were getting a very strong sense from shareholders that we should consider an outside candidate,” and: “There’s going to be a full re-positioning of this company.” The Globe and Mail writes that CI then had $130 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets under management, had averaged net redemptions of $2.6 billion a quarter over the previous four fiscal quarters, and that its shares had fallen 45% from their peak in May 2014; Geoffrey Kwan, an analyst at RBC Dominion Securities, wrote in a research note that CI had been likely to look for a new chief executive with significant experience in the asset management industry outside Canada and that his credentials fit that criterion. The paper notes that he was not available for an interview that day.⁠[13]

He recalled that CI had then been listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange for about 25 years, that its primary business was Canadian asset management, that effectively all of its profit came from the Canadian mutual fund business, with “Several hundred million dollars a year of EBITDA,” and that, as the rise of ETFs and the growing importance of alternatives slowed the growth of mutual funds, the company went looking for a new strategic direction and ran an executive search in which he was the candidate selected.⁠[4][4]

He said that during the interview process the board asked how he saw the company’s future direction, and that one of the core pillars of the strategy he laid out was to launch an ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business first in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and, once it had succeeded, to take it global; the board, made up largely of significant owners of the company, welcomed the plan, so that he was able to start executing it from his first day.⁠[4][4][4]

He gave three reasons for choosing this direction: first, demand for wealth management is growing, with more wealth being created, more concentrated, more complex, passing between generations faster and more global; second, the industry is shaped like a barbell, with large banks at one end, small local firms at the other and a great deal of white space in between; third, the industry is built on a flawed structure, in which advisors are independent contractors sharing someone else’s brand, technology and office space and competing with one another for clients inside the same firm, while tax, financial planning and other specialists are a cost center to the advisor, so that the loser is the client and, after the client, the firm itself.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

In their 2026 conversation David SenraDavid SenraDavid Senra is the founder and host of the Founders podcast, on which he reads biographies of entrepreneurs to discuss starting and running businesses and making personal decisions. He began producing the show in 2016, partnered with Colossus in 2022, and in 2025 launched David Senra, a long-form interview show under his own name.Open the full entry said that he was 39 when he was recruited for the post and had never been a chief executive before, and he answered “Correct.”⁠[4]

The Globe and Mail’s profile relates that on his first day he sent a company-wide e-mail introducing himself to more than 2,500 employees and received several hundred replies. He set three priorities for CI: modernizing the asset-management business, expanding the wealth-management arm and globalizing the company.⁠[1]

The Globe and Mail writes that in the four months after he joined CI on September 1, 2019, the company announced five acquisitions in a matter of months: in October 2019 it bought the digital financial-planning software company Snap Projections Inc.; it took a 49% equity stake in the Australian equity manager Redpoint Investment Management Ltd.; at the end of October it entered a strategic partnership with the fintech company d1g1t Inc.; it acquired WisdomTree’s Canadian arm, adding almost $1 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets to CI’s ETF division; and at the end of 2019 it bought two U.S. registered investment adviser (RIA) firms, One Capital and Surevest Wealth Management. A timeline printed with a later article in the same paper records that on November 7, 2019, he said CI would begin acquiring investment-advisory businesses in the United States. Wealth Professional writes that WisdomTree’s Canadian ETF business became part of CI in February 2020, bringing 14 ETFs listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange with about $1 billion in assets and raising CI’s ETF assets to more than $10 billion.⁠[1][2][15]

At September 30, 2019, CI managed about $132 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets, down 5% from a year earlier. He had a machine-learning analytics tool built for the sales and marketing team, similar to one he had introduced at WisdomTree; he said the company was finalizing a partnership with a global private-equity manager, and that CI would be a “natural buyer” if another ETF provider came up for sale.⁠[1]

Interviewed at CI’s head office in Toronto, he said: “Scale is becoming increasingly important and difficult to achieve in Canada alone,” and: “We have the cash flow, the businesses and the relationships to be the industry pace setter.” Asked what he missed about New York, he answered “the pace.” The article says in one place that he had spent the previous decade abroad and in another that it was 13 years. The article adds that the chairman, Bill Holland, had been looking for someone “digitally savvy.”⁠[1]

CI Financial’s management information circular dated May 5, 2020, states that the board set his annual salary at C$800,000 for 2019 and for 2020, naming his “relocation from the United States to Canada” as one of the factors; for 2019 he was paid C$266,667 in salary, pro rata for September 1 to December 31, together with share-based awards of C$800,000, an annual incentive of C$266,667 and a one-time signing award of 203,136 restricted share units (RSUs) valued at C$3,875,835, for total compensation of C$5,209,169. The circular states that if he is terminated without cause he is entitled to 12 consecutive months’ pay. Its director nominee profile gives his place of residence as Chicago, IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry, in the United States, shows him owning or controlling 250,660 CI shares and RSUs, valued at C$3,474,148 at the closing price on May 5, 2020, and notes that he had until 2022 to meet the share ownership requirement.⁠[6]

The Globe and Mail writes that CI entered the U.S. market in February 2020 and by November of that year had built U.S. wealth assets of more than US$16.5 billion through 12 acquisitions in CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, ArizonaArizonaArizona is a state in the southwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912, as the 48th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 7,151,502.Open the full entry, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, ArkansasArkansasArkansas is a U.S. state bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital and largest city is Little Rock. Arkansas was admitted to the Union on June 15, 1836, as the 25th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 3,011,524.Open the full entry, FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, Illinois, OhioOhioOhio is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital is Columbus. It joined the Union in 1803 as the 17th state, the first carved from the Northwest Territory, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 11,799,448.Open the full entry, New York and MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry; they included Roosevelt Investment Group Inc. of New York (US$2.7 billion under management), Doyle Wealth Management in Florida (about US$1.1 billion) and a majority stake in Stavis & Cohen Financial LLC of Houston (about US$570 million). The first four RIA purchases, completed before September, cost $306 million (currency not stated in the source), with up to $90 million more payable if the firms met their targets; CI then had about $202 billion in assets under management.⁠[16]

In the paper’s interview he said: “The velocity of deals that we are able to do is picking up,” described progress as “ahead of schedule,” and said CI was on track to become one of the top five U.S. RIA firms by assets; he declined to say how many firms he hoped to acquire. He named cross-border clients as one target, including snowbird retirees in Florida, Arizona and southern California, families in New York and Boston whose children stay in the United States after university, and energy executives in Houston.⁠[16]

He himself dates the start of the business to April 2020: in the 2026 conversation he said he launched Corient in about April 2020, just as COVID began and everyone’s normal schedule halted in March 2020, which in his view created many challenges but also allowed him to accelerate the building of the business; in a Q&A with WealthManagement.com in August 2026 he said: “I launched the business in April of 2020 with $50 billion of assets” (currency not stated in the source). Corient’s website states that the firm was launched in 2020 in the United States.⁠[4][4][17][10]

RIABiz wrote on November 18, 2020, that CI had never done a U.S. deal before and in under ten months of 2020 completed 12 of them, totaling $16 billion (currency not stated in the source) in managed assets, all paid in cash up to that point; the article says that when he was hired in September 2019 he was given a “very flexible mandate.” The article notes that CI’s own stock traded at about 7 times EBITDA in Canada, while the multiple it paid for a U.S. wealth management firm was sometimes close to twice that, and Brooks Hamner, a vice president of Mercer Capital, said CI had booked nearly $2 billion in debt. He replied: “I’m very comfortable with the valuations we are paying,” said “It is misleading to assume that we are the high price bidder” and acknowledged that “nothing is risk free”; he said that 330,000 Canadians used CI as their primary advisor, and described a far more decentralized approach to integration, with the firms’ owners themselves convening a committee.⁠[7]

The same article quotes views from the industry: Peter Nesvold of Nesvold Capital Partners said CI “has one-upped” private equity; Dave DeVoe of DeVoe & Co. said he could not recall a firm entering the market with “so much momentum”; Brian Hamburger, chief executive of MarketCounsel, said he had not seen evidence of business acumen from CI; Steve Levitt of Park Sutton Advisors called CI a “strategic blue chip Canadian company with deep pockets”; the consultant Jamie McLaughlin said he “is selling himself as well as the firm”; and Rudy Adolf, chief executive of Focus Financial, criticized “amateur foreign buyers” who pay “absurd” multiples, without naming CI.⁠[7]

On July 1, 2020, the trade publication Wealth Professional carried an entry on him in its “Hot List 2020” special report.⁠[15]

CI’s common shares began trading on the New York Stock ExchangeNew York Stock ExchangeThe New York Stock Exchange is a securities exchange on Wall Street in New York City. It traces its origins to the Buttonwood Agreement signed by 24 stockbrokers in 1792, has used its present name since 1863 and has been owned by Intercontinental Exchange since 2013.Open the full entry on November 17, 2020, under the ticker CIXX, with CI ringing the bell at the exchange that day; until then the shares had traded only in Canada. He said the U.S. listing would let the company offer U.S. dollar-denominated shares when making acquisitions in that country, which it would do accretively.⁠[16][7]

He recalled that Corient was a separate entity, independent of CI, and needed a headquarters of its own, and that because the business had been built from scratch the choice was not tied to any particular transaction or corporate history. He picked Miami at the end of 2020, moved to Miami himself and built the business there.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that what set Miami apart was how engaged local people were in creating positive reinforcement for building a community; he called Francis Suarez, the former mayor of Miami, a good friend and the best “ambassador” for a city he had ever seen, who created a very welcoming environment during his tenure. He said he was by no means a pioneer of moving to Miami but was a little early relative to the flood that followed; his worry at the time was whether there would be enough local talent to hire as the business grew, and things since had significantly exceeded his expectations in establishing a presence, operating the business and employee satisfaction.⁠[4][4][4][4]

At CI’s annual meeting of shareholders on June 16, 2021, he was elected a director with 98.89% of the votes (135,569,816 for and 1,521,962 withheld); the advisory resolution on the approach to executive compensation was not carried, with 52,195,182 votes for (38.07%) and 84,896,596 against (61.93%).⁠[18]

The Globe and Mail writes that his total compensation for 2020 was $6.01 million (currency not stated in the source), including a cash bonus of $1 million, share awards of $4.2 million and a base salary of $800,000; support in the equivalent vote in 2020 had been 72.6%, and in 2021 CI was one of just six companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that failed to get 50%.⁠[19]

RIABiz wrote on September 16, 2021, that CI and Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, had announced that CI would establish a U.S. headquarters in Miami by 2023, committing to lease 20,000 square feet at 830 Brickell Plaza, a 55-story building still under construction; the release also quoted Miami’s mayor, Francis X. Suarez. In the release he said: “Miami is an incredible place to establish our U.S. headquarters and support our fast-growing U.S. business.” The article states that he then planned to divide his time between Miami and his Toronto office and that the external public-relations spokesman Trevor Davis declined to say whether he would move; it adds that since November 2019 CI had bought 17 RIAs plus four sub-acquisitions, and puts its wealth management platform at $77 billion (currency not stated in the source).⁠[20]

A later long article in The Globe and Mail states that he had at first, in 2019, said he would relocate to Toronto and had since established a residence in Miami, and that CI was building a 40,000-square-foot headquarters in a 57-storey tower on Brickell Avenue in Miami. Bloomberg wrote in August 2022 that company filings showed him to be a Miami resident and that he said he spent about half his time in Toronto.⁠[2][8]

Bloomberg writes that in February 2022 he called CI’s shares “criminally undervalued,” that they fell a further 34% between then and the end of August, and that they had lost almost half their value since the start of 2022; in April 2022 S&P GlobalS&P GlobalS&P Global Inc. is a financial information company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that provides credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and workflow solutions for global capital and commodity markets. Its divisions include S&P Global Ratings and S&P Dow Jones Indices.Open the full entry Ratings cut CI’s rating to just above junk, pointing to its heavier debt load. In 2026 he said that he had used that phrase for the share price many times in the media.⁠[8][4]

RIABiz writes that on April 7, 2022, CI announced a plan to take its U.S. wealth management business public, selling up to 20% and keeping 80%, and that it announced the intention before filing an S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry. He said: “We’re in the first inning of what we want to accomplish.” Drawing on research by ECHELON Partners, the article puts CI’s cumulative deals at $2.7 billion (currency not stated in the source), about 75% of it paid in cash at closing; Dan Seivert, chief executive of ECHELON Partners, said “He’s done a super job of acquiring firms” while judging CI to be “in a worse position in terms of integration than Focus,” and Matt Crow, president of Mercer Capital, said it “feels like financial engineering to me.”⁠[21]

Bloomberg wrote on August 30, 2022, that under him CI had made about 30 debt-fueled acquisitions, more than two dozen of them RIAs in markets including New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and Seattle, which together held $115 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets; the Edward Jones analyst Jim Shanahan estimated that CI had allocated well over C$1.5 billion (given in parentheses as “$1.2 billion”) to U.S. wealth management in two years. He considered the reaction of investors unjustified, said the benefits of the U.S. strategy were not reflected in the valuation and presented the listing as the way to address that. The chairman, Bill Holland, called the decision three years earlier to pursue the U.S. strategy “the single best decision we made.” Brian Hamburger said CI had paid well above other acquirers and questioned how it would align the advisers it had bought. The article adds that under him CI restructured its Canadian fund-management arm under the CI Global Asset Management brand, that Eric Bushell, chief investment officer of the C$55 billion Signature Funds line, retired at 52, and that 13 portfolio managers, traders and analysts left for the Bank of Montreal.⁠[8]

Looking back in 2026, he said that in 2021 CI was the best or second-best performing financial services stock in North America and in 2022 the second worst. He linked the volatility to the shareholder base: strategic investors held about 15% to 17% of the float and, together with index funds obliged to hold the stock, about 25% of the shares were locked up, leaving about 75% actively traded and held by hedge funds and mutual funds; the hedge funds piled in during 2021 and left in 2022, while the value-oriented mutual funds had been in net redemptions for years, so that every morning someone had to sell CI shares to meet redemptions. He also granted that public markets do not usually love transformation stories, and that CI was using the cash flow of a Canadian asset manager to launch a global ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On June 14, 2022, The Globe and Mail wrote that ISS and Glass Lewis were, for the second year running, recommending that shareholders vote against CI’s advisory say-on-pay resolution at the annual meeting the following week. His total compensation for 2021 was $10.6 million (currency not stated in the source), up more than 75% from $6.01 million the year before, including a cash bonus of $3.88 million, share awards of nearly $5.6 million and a base salary of $1,125,000 (up 40.6% from $800,000 in 2020), together with a special stock award valued at $1.7 million. ISS considered that the special award relied on criteria already recognized in his regular performance scorecard; Glass Lewis pointed out that he was paid more than four times the average compensation of the other executives disclosed in the circular and recommended withholding votes from David Miller, the director who chaired the compensation committee. CI said in its circular that institutional shareholders had given it similar feedback, so that it began work in 2020 on a performance scorecard for him and, with the help of outside consultants, introduced it in 2021; its spokesperson, Murray Oxby, said the company was “encouraged” that the vast majority of shareholders who had voted before the proxy advisers’ reports were released had voted in favor of the revised approach to compensation.⁠[19]

At the annual meeting on June 22, 2022, the vote on the board’s disclosed approach to executive compensation did not carry. The Canadian Press wrote that nearly 55% of shareholders voted against, compared with 61.9% the year before, making it the second straight failure; The Globe and Mail puts support at 45% and writes that CI was the only Canadian company to lose the vote two years in a row. At this meeting he was elected a director with 99.17% of the votes (138,354,796 for and 1,156,920 withheld).⁠[22][23][2]

The Globe and Mail writes that CI changed its pay peer group, dropping Canaccord Genuity, Fiera Capital Corp., Guardian Capital Group Ltd. and Sprott Inc. and adding Morgan StanleyMorgan StanleyMorgan Stanley is an American global financial services firm that grew from an investment banking partnership into a publicly traded financial group spanning investment banking, securities trading, wealth management, and investment management.Open the full entry and Charles Schwab CorpThe Charles Schwab CorporationThe Charles Schwab Corporation is a financial services company headquartered in Westlake, Texas, United States, whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SCHW). Through its subsidiaries it operates wealth management, securities brokerage, banking, asset management, and custody businesses, and it was founded by Charles R. Schwab in 1971.Open the full entry., which in the paper’s reading allowed CI to push up the benchmark for his pay; his package was the second-highest among disclosed executives of Canadian wealth managers, behind Dan Daviau, chief executive of Canaccord Genuity.⁠[2]

RIABiz wrote on November 17, 2022, that CI planned an initial public offering of its U.S. RIA business in 2023 and had promised to file the S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by November 30; the chief financial officer, Amit Muni, said on a conference call that the company was “considering selling a larger portion of our ownership” than the 20% first announced. He said: “The Canadian business will retain the existing debt, which includes the deferred acquisition payments,” and that after the listing the Canadian business would not fund any future U.S. acquisitions. The article states that the U.S. business had grown from nothing to $126 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets under management in less than two years, that CI had $2.7 billion of net debt, that the maximum net debt covenant of its credit facility was 4.5 times while actual leverage was 3.7 times, and that the target going forward was 1.5 to 2 times; CI would also delist its shares from the New York Stock Exchange; he said retention in the wealth businesses was “north of 99%.” The article gives the shares’ close on that exchange a year earlier as $23.62 and says they “closed today at $11.01.” Matt Crow’s view was that the company had probably raised the covenant to 4.5 simply to get some breathing room.⁠[24]

A long article published by The Globe and Mail on January 27, 2023, states that over three years CI had spent $2.85 billion (currency not stated in the source) in cash, stock and estimated future payments on 34 wealth management firms, all but three of them in the United States, almost a dozen of the U.S. RIAs in the first year of his tenure, and that about half of the $375 billion in client assets CI managed sat in the U.S. RIA business. Long-term debt was nearly $4 billion at September 30 and debt exceeded 3.5 times EBITDA, against less than 1 time in 2016 and 2017; Scott Chan, a research analyst at Canaccord Genuity Group Inc., pointed out that almost two-thirds of CI’s debt carried low, fixed rates and distant maturities. In the 12 months to September 30 CI’s revenue was $2.95 billion, up 39% from the similar period in 2019, while net income fell 18% to $433 million and EBITDA as measured by S&P Global Market Intelligence was $1.06 billion, up 26% from 2019. Since September 1, 2019, CI’s shares had a dividend-adjusted loss of 2.9%, the second worst in a group of 24 financial companies whose median return was nearly 70%; the dividend-adjusted high of the share price was $29.14 in November 2021. The article states that DBRS Morningstar Ltd. downgraded CI’s credit rating “Last May” (that is, May 2022) to “reflect the persistently high debt levels at the company.” The timeline printed with the article also records that on January 25, 2021, CI said a deal to buy a Chicago firm, its biggest ever, would double its U.S. wealth assets to US$46.1 billion; that on November 11, 2021, CI said it had posted record earnings and asset levels in the third quarter; and that on August 11, 2022, CI announced a second consecutive quarter of declining assets.⁠[2]

The same article states that CI intended to delist from the New York Stock Exchange after the U.S. business was listed, keeping only its listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange, while it planned to “effectively privatize” the Canadian business through share buybacks, with no timeline given; the U.S. business might sell more than the 20% first planned in order to reduce debt. The former chief financial officer, Doug Jamieson, had said that for leverage to go above 1.5 times “it would certainly have to be a good deal,” and resigned in the fall of 2020; a 13-person team of portfolio managers and analysts moved to BMO Asset Management. Pointing to disclosure restrictions around the U.S. prospectus, CI declined the paper’s requests to interview him and the chairman, Holland.⁠[2]

The article gathers criticism of the prices paid and his replies: Rudy Adolf, chief executive of Focus Financial, on a call in August 2020 described prices for U.S. wealth managers as “insane,” said a price from an “international buyer” had stunned him, and later said the “drunken sailors” who had overpaid had left the market; Rick Hough, chief executive of Silvercrest Asset Management, said: “Many of these businesses are not worth the price that they’re being acquired for”; the Edward Jones analyst Jim Shanahan said: “I’m not sure that CI is necessarily the source of pride that it once was amongst Canadian investors”; and Scott Chan said: “I like the strategy. I just think it was accelerated.” His reply was: “we felt that we paid a fair price that’s reflective of the quality of the platform”; in an interview with Barron’s he said: “I find it fascinating that people like to opine on the purchase prices that CI has paid,” and also that a company could have a great business and a strategy people agreed with, “But if people don’t want to work with you, it’s probably not going to work out.”⁠[2]

Looking back in 2026, he said that he used the cash flow generated by the Canadian business, and leverage, to build Corient, with leverage ranging from about 3 to 3.5 times; in his account the rule of thumb for asset managers is about 2 times, wealth managers tend to carry more, and what matters more is the composition of the debt: CI’s was not floating-rate debt with covenants but fixed-rate debt without covenants, extending out as far as 30 years, so that he was comfortable throughout with both the capital allocation policy and the level of debt.⁠[4][4][4][4]

He said he would have assumed that the success of the underlying business and the benefits of diversification would be recognized faster in the share price, but that at no point did he change his conviction about the opportunity. He said the company was always going to go private, that he had been very transparent with the market about it, and that the route he had assumed was a share buyback program: throughout his tenure CI was building Corient while reducing its share count, with many of the shares bought back at “12 or 13 dollars a share” (currency not stated in the source); he contrasted the visceral reaction of public markets with private equity investors, for whom such a course is the standard blueprint.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In May 2023 CI announced that institutional investors including a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Bain Capital, Flexpoint Ford, funds of Ares ManagementAres ManagementAres Management is an alternative asset manager founded in 1997 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, with businesses spanning credit, real assets, secondaries, and private equity. As of June 30, 2026, the company’s assets under management were $671.319 billion, of which the private equity business accounted for $24.451 billion.Open the full entry and the State of WisconsinWisconsinWisconsin is a state in the north-central United States; its capital is Madison and its largest city is Milwaukee. Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on May 29, 1848, as the 30th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 5,893,718 residents.Open the full entry would invest about C$1.34 billion (US$1.0 billion) in convertible preferred equity of its U.S. wealth management business (CI US), leaving the investors with 20% and CI with 80% at closing; the preferred equity converts automatically into common equity on the closing of a qualified initial public offering of CI US, its holders are entitled to dividends only if the board of CI US declares them, which CI US had no current intention of doing, and it carries a liquidation preference and customary minority consent, exit and other rights. The company said the investment was made at an enterprise value of C$7.1 billion for CI US, 25.6 times its annualized adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2023, and, with another recent asset sale, brought in C$1.5 billion, all of it applied to deleveraging, taking the net leverage ratio from 4.0 times to 2.7 times; closing was expected in late May 2023. The release states that the company had begun an IPO process for the U.S. business in late 2022 and had announced the submission of an IPO registration statement, and that the investment preserved its flexibility to proceed with an offering in the future. It gives the client assets that CI managed and advised on as about C$391.1 billion (US$289.4 billion) at March 31, 2023. He said the investment “validates our differentiated U.S. wealth management strategy.”⁠[25]

RIABiz writes that the deal was announced on Thursday, May 11, 2023, with Bain Capital LP and other investors putting up the money; analysts’ concern was that, because the preferred equity carried a “14%-plus” payment-in-kind (PIK) provision, the small print in effect gave up 40% to 45% of the common equity instead of the 20% announced. Later RIABiz articles put the PIK rate at 14.5% a year and state that the investment came with a deadline of 2030. If the U.S. business were not public by 2030, the Bain-led investors would have absolute say over whether it was liquidated. Greggory Warren, an analyst at Morningstar, kept a four-star rating on the stock while voicing concern that the deal curtailed what CI had done best in the RIA market, namely deals; the BMO analyst Tom MacKinnon estimated that the interest of CI’s common shareholders in the U.S. business could fall as low as 55%, against the 80% announced; BMO cut CI from “outperform” to “market perform” and Barclays from “overweight” to “equal weight.” CI’s U.S. stock (ticker CIXXF) rose 40% in the week of the announcement, from $9.56 to a high of $13.72 (currency not stated in the source for these two figures), and closed at US$9.34 on May 16, 2023. He said: “There’s no path to control for them,” and that the company “fully intend to be public well in advance of that”; of the heavy dealmaking of 2021 he said: “2021 was an unusual year because of [anticipated] tax [capital gains] changes that ultimately never went through,” adding that people who had planned to sell in 2022, 2023 and 2024 had pulled their sales forward.⁠[26][27][28]

The Globe and Mail writes that the buyers could force a listing or sale of the U.S. business within five years and nine months of closing, that analysts estimated the effective annual cost of the preferred shares at about 14%, and that CI paused its listing plans after the sale; S&P downgraded CI to junk, and in May 2023 CI asked S&P to stop rating it; Morningstar DBRS rated CI in June 2023 at two notches above junk.⁠[29]

The Globe and Mail writes that his total compensation for 2022 fell to $7.33 million (currency not stated in the source), chiefly because his bonus dropped from $3.88 million to $1.22 million; CI’s shares fell 46.3% in 2022 including dividends, the worst among the two dozen financial peers the company uses for pay benchmarking. In response to shareholders the company overhauled its pay plans: the incentive plan gained quantitative measures, left the board less discretion and gave more weight to profitability and total shareholder return, and performance share units (PSUs) vest on earnings-per-share goals, so that in the company’s words the chief executive must “earn the PSUs twice” to realize value; the scorecard was weighted 80% financial and 20% strategic, and for 2022 CI beat its targets on EBITDA margin and on fund inflows to its wealth business, received no credit for total shareholder return or change in earnings per share, and scored full marks on the strategic part; Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley were removed from the peer group and AGF Management, Canaccord Genuity Group, Fiera Capital Corp. and others added.⁠[30]

The approach went to an advisory vote at the annual meeting of June 27, 2023, and 91.38% of shareholders voted in favor. ISS and Glass Lewis both recommended a yes vote that year: Glass Lewis wrote that the improvements to the structure of the pay program together with the alignment of pay with performance “is noteworthy,” while ISS gave a “cautious” favorable recommendation and observed that CI’s total shareholder return was the lowest against peers on its quantitative screen. The chairman, William Holland, had 26.47% of votes withheld, ISS having recommended that shareholders hold him accountable because fewer than 30% of the board were women.⁠[31][30]

RIABiz wrote on August 3, 2023, that he had retired legacy brands including RegentAtlantic, Budros, Ruhlin & Roe and Brightworth with immediate effect and put the U.S. wealth management business under the single name Corient. CI had bought Corient Capital Partners in 2022, after it had grown to $5 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets under management; the company’s release says the name originated with one of its legacy firms and derives from “client oriented,” whereas RIABiz writes that it was engineered largely by Dynasty Financial Partners in 2015 for a team leaving Merrill Lynch. The release gives U.S. wealth management assets of $147 billion; the first Form ADV that Corient filed, on July 31, 2023, lists 48 brands and 825 employees. CI kept the CI Private Wealth brand for its Canadian ultra-high-net-worth business. He said: “The unified Corient brand clarifies for clients that they benefit from the expertise of our entire network.” Joe Anthony, president of the public-relations firm GregoryFCA, said: “Make no mistake, CI had to do something with the brand name here in the U.S.” The article adds that CI’s net debt had nearly tripled since 2019, to C$4.1 billion.⁠[32]

On how the name was chosen, RIABiz writes that a third-party branding agency researched and listed options, that more than 70 partners took part in focus groups which cut the list to two, and that all partners then voted, Corient winning by a wide margin. In 2026 he recalled that he first held a town hall across the firm and announced that it needed a name, saying he had no idea what it would be and did not care, but that everyone who wished to be involved must have a voice; he and the chief marketing officer ran a series of focus groups in which, the firm being much smaller then, about 75 people took part; the finalist names were all mocked up in the same brand style, so that imagery would not sway the vote, and the name was then chosen by a live vote at a town hall of the partners. That way, he said, on the first day under the new name everyone who was there had had the opportunity to help name the firm.⁠[32][4][4][4][4]

A commentary published in The Globe and Mail after the renaming argues that this former McKinsey partner was applying what consulting circles call a “roll-up strategy” to the U.S. RIA sector, with CI paying premium prices for many of the businesses and borrowing to fund the acquisitions; it compares him with Mike Pearson, another former McKinsey partner turned chief executive, whose Valeant fell apart as loans came due, and calls his account of the May stake sale (that the offering valued the U.S. division at $7.1 billion (currency not stated in the source), three times the market capitalization of the whole company) “aggressive, to put it politely”; in the commentary’s view he needs to prove that Corient can retain assets over a full market cycle, and the key is also keeping the talent around after a deal is done. The commentary notes that in the preceding four months CI had bought three more RIAs (two in Texas and one in New York, managing a combined $14.2 billion) and a female-founded Montreal wealth manager overseeing $1.3 billion, had raised its common share dividend by 11% earlier that month, had bought back $229 million of stock in the latest quarter, and that its shares were up 36% since the preferred share offering in May.⁠[33]

The Globe and Mail writes that in late April 2024 Moody’s downgraded CI to Baa3, the last step before non-investment grade, pointing to “persistently high debt leverage no longer commensurate with its previous ratings level.” CI’s debt had risen from $1.6 billion (currency not stated in the source) at the end of 2019 to $4.2 billion at the end of 2022, and long-term debt stood at $3.6 billion at March 31, 2024, up $100 million in the quarter; the shares fell as much as 12.5% in the two days after the first-quarter results. He said he was “very, very comfortable” with the debt levels, that the focus from then on would be “singularly focused on share buybacks and debt reductions,” and that buying shares at current prices was “much more accretive for our shareholders than not buying shares”; whether the company kept its investment grade, he said, would depend on how the credit agencies viewed the deleveraging.⁠[29]

The same article states that CI spent $475 million (currency not stated in the source) on share buybacks in 2023, against $230 million in 2022, and that its shares outstanding had fallen by more than a third since 2018; contingent consideration owed on acquisitions was estimated at $486.6 million at March 31, 2024, and CI said it had spent $570 million in cash in 2023 settling such liabilities. The article refers to his plan to split the Canadian business and Corient apart. Nadja Dreff, a senior vice-president at Morningstar DBRS, said: “We’ve been very vocal about the need for the company to start paying this debt.”⁠[29]

RIABiz wrote on May 22, 2024, that CI had priced an offering of US$675 million aggregate principal amount of 7.500% notes due 2029, with about US$645 million of the net proceeds going to repurchase its 4.100% notes due 2051, and had begun a cash tender offer for all of the 2051 notes; a company spokesman wrote that it had tendered for all US$900 million of the 2051 notes at roughly 65% of par. On a conference call on May 10 he said: “The debt is the final piece of the separation of Canada from the US businesses,” “The business is fully separable now or essentially IPO ready,” and “We’re very comfortable with our debt levels,” putting debt at 3.5 turns, 3.4 excluding currency effects and 2.9 at market value. The article gives Corient about $167 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets under management at the time and notes that it had bought Windsor Wealth of Indianapolis, which managed $1.9 billion, in October 2023 and had refrained from M&A for three quarters since, including the current one.⁠[27]

At CI’s annual meeting of shareholders on June 26, 2024, he was again elected a director, with 98.55% of the votes (90,907,183 for and 1,335,846 withheld), and the advisory resolution on executive compensation carried with 93.93% support; the five other directors elected were William E. Butt, Brigette Chang, William T. Holland, Paul J. Perrow and Sarah M. Ward.⁠[34]

On November 25, 2024, CI announced an agreement under which Mubadala Capital would buy the company for C$32 a share in cash: 33% above the last closing price and 58% above the 60-day volume-weighted average price, an equity value of about C$4.7 billion (US$3.4 billion) and, with debt, an enterprise value of about C$12.1 billion. CI’s website describes Mubadala Capital as the alternative asset management subsidiary of Mubadala Investment CompanyMubadala Investment CompanyMubadala Investment Company (Mubadala) is a sovereign investor wholly owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi. It was formed in 2017 by the merger of the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), founded in 1984, and Mubadala Development Company, founded in 2002, and absorbed the Abu Dhabi Investment Council the following year; as of the end of 2025 it managed about AED 1.4 trillion (US$385 billion) in assets, with business in more than 80 countries.Open the full entry, a sovereign investor headquartered in Abu Dhabi. He was to stay on as chief executive and a director, and CI would keep its existing management team and operate independently of Mubadala Capital’s other businesses; the deal needed court and regulatory approval and was expected to close in the second quarter of 2025. CI had C$518 billion in client assets at September 30, 2024, close to half of it in the United States.⁠[35][36][28][37]

Bloomberg writes that CI’s shares were up 30% at C$31.25 at 11:40 a.m. in Toronto after the news; that a board committee of independent directors approved the deal unanimously; that the acquisition was large enough to need the approval of the government of Canada and was also subject to U.S. regulatory approval; that insiders would roll some of their shares into the private company; that CI would be delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange but remain a reporting issuer in Canada because of its outstanding debentures and notes; that dividends already announced would be paid and later ones suspended; that Mubadala Capital planned to fund up to C$750 million in additional cash at closing to reduce outstanding preferred equity; and that in certain circumstances CI would owe a termination fee of C$150 million and Mubadala Capital a reverse termination fee of C$225 million. He said Mubadala Capital was capital with a long-term view that offered “stability and certainty” for CI’s clients and employees; the article adds that earlier that month he had said to analysts that the plans to take Corient public could be revived in 2026. The article states that CI brought in 30 RIAs between late 2019 and 2022 and that in the third quarter of 2024 Corient bought two more, with combined assets of C$8.1 billion.⁠[36]

RIABiz wrote the next day that the shares held by senior management would go into equity rollover agreements instead of being exchanged for cash, and a note by its editor, Brooke Southall, states that MacAlpine held $40 million (currency not stated in the source) in shares to roll into the new venture; Corient managed $185 billion in client assets at September 30, 2024; and the holders of Corient Holdings’ preferred equity had agreed to waive and amend certain liquidity and other rights through closing. William E. Butt, lead director and chair of the special committee, said the deal “provides certainty to shareholders while CI pursues its ongoing transformation.” He said: “With this transaction, CI has never been better positioned.”⁠[28]

In the conversation published in October 2026 he recalled that about two years earlier he had received an inbound call from Mubadala Capital, which said that it loved the business and the strategy, understood exactly what he was doing and why he was buying back shares, and reckoned that it would take him about nine years to buy the remaining shares he wanted, with trade-offs along the way in executing the Corient strategy given the capital needed on both sides. He said he agreed with all of it, and that the conversations went on from there to how to take the business out of the public markets, deliver a good return to shareholders and own and operate it in a private context; he added that a Canadian mutual fund company had never really belonged in the public markets anyway.⁠[4][4]

A commentary in The Globe and Mail called the sale “a case of the drunken sailors getting a bailout for their sinking ship,” while granting that Bill Holland and he deserved some credit for selling the company. The figures it sets out are: CI said it had spent $4.36 billion (currency not stated in the source) since 2020 on 41 wealth-management acquisitions, 38 of them in the United States, about half of it in cash up front; at $32 a share and just under 142 million shares the price for CI’s equity was $4.54 billion, only $180 million more than CI had spent over five years building the U.S. business; in the 12 months to September 30 the U.S. wealth management business had negative EBITDA of $436 million and a pretax loss of more than $600 million, with adjusted EBITDA of about $450 million; conventional long-term debt had reached $4.2 billion by the end of 2022 and had since come down to about $3.7 billion, and S&P Global Market Intelligence put total debt including the preferred shares at nearly $5.8 billion; the Canadian fund operations had $135 billion in assets under management and the Canadian wealth arm another $100 billion, and the fund business recorded $880 million of EBITDA over the previous four quarters. The commentary notes that CI’s shares topped $36 in 2014 and were still above $30 in November 2021, and that $32 a share was 130% above the 52-week low set in June.⁠[38]

CI and Mubadala Capital announced that the C$12.1 billion take-private transaction had been completed by way of a statutory plan of arrangement under Ontario’s Business Corporations Act, effective August 12, 2025: apart from the Rollover Shares, shareholders received C$32.00 a share in cash, the Mubadala investor paid C$4,599,384,096 in aggregate, and after closing it held, indirectly through Accelerate Holdings Corp., 144,228,914 shares, or 100%. The release states that the chief executive rolled all of his equity into the continuing company in partnership with Mubadala Capital, and that MC Accelerate Holdings LP, a limited partnership affiliated with the Mubadala investor, acquired all of the Rollover Shares in exchange for its class A interests at an implied value of C$32.00 a share. The copy of the release on CI’s own website adds in a footnote that 1,842 of his 1,933,047 shares and share equivalents were held in a retirement account and were ineligible for a rollover. The Globe and Mail gives the closing date as August 13.⁠[39][40][41]

The release states that after closing CI’s headquarters remained in Toronto and that the firm continued to operate independently under its existing corporate structure, strategy, brand names and management team, led by him; the directors William Butt, Brigette Chang, Paul J. Perrow and Sarah Ward resigned, Samuel Merksamer, Murat Konuk and Glyn Barker were appointed, and he and William Holland remained directors; CI’s common shares were expected to be delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange shortly after closing, with the company remaining a reporting issuer in each province of Canada. In the release he said: “This is an exciting new chapter for CI,” and called Mubadala Capital “the perfect partner”; Hani Barhoush, chief executive and managing director of Mubadala Capital, called CI “an incredible business.” The release adds that the deal preserves Corient’s private partnership model.⁠[39]

He said that the company was taken private with no incremental debt, that the transaction in fact involved deleveraging, an equity infusion, and that there were no cost synergies and no change of strategic direction; he gave its dates as announced in November 2024 and completed on August 12, 2025. In an interview with RIABiz he said: “We actually injected equity to de-lever the business when it happened.”⁠[4][4][9]

Advisor.ca writes that on Tuesday, September 2, 2025, Corient announced that it would acquire two European firms: Stonehage Fleming, a family office and fiduciary services provider bringing more than US$175 billion in client assets, and Stanhope Capital Group, a wealth management and advisory firm bringing almost US$40 billion, in a deal that includes its New York-based multi-family office FFT Wealth Management. Combined, Corient’s assets would be about US$430 billion; the price and other details were not disclosed, and closing was expected in early 2026, where The Globe and Mail writes the first half of 2026 and RIABiz dates the press release September 3. The combined business would use the Corient brand: Giuseppe Ciucci, executive chairman of Stonehage Fleming, would be partner and chairman of the combined business; Daniel Pinto, founder of Stanhope, partner and chief executive of the international business; Stuart Parkinson, chief executive of Stonehage, partner and president of the international business; and Keith Bloomfield, founder and chief executive of FFT Wealth, partner and vice-chairman, with Ciucci and Pinto joining Corient’s global board. He said: “This combination of three storied firms creates a truly global wealth manager and multi-family office.”⁠[42][40][9]

The Globe and Mail writes that Stonehage Fleming is based in Jersey, is 50 years old and operates in 12 jurisdictions across Europe, Canada and the United States, and that Stanhope Capital has its head office in London and was founded 21 years earlier by its chief executive, Daniel Pinto; CI did not disclose financial terms, and the article, applying the roughly 2% of client assets seen in recent Canadian deals, offers its own estimate that the two firms could together be worth about US$4.2 billion, making clear that this is not a published figure. The press release quotes him: “With this expansion, Corient becomes the world’s largest independent advisory firm.”⁠[40]

On September 4, 2025, RIABiz published an interview with him. He said that if he was to globalize he wanted to do it “properly”: “I didn’t want to do it in dabble, where I’m adding complexity.” The article states that, by Corient’s statement, the acquisitions were funded in cash by Mubadala Capital through a new subsidiary of CI Financial’s parent, and that both firms had already been merged under the Corient brand and integrated as a single firm, the statement adding: “There is no new equity per se”; Caledonia Investments, a London-listed investment trust, was selling its 37% stake in Stonehage Fleming for $387 million (currency not stated in the source), and the article relays the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry’ figure of about $1 billion for the sale price; Stonehage Fleming, formed in 2014, had more than 900 employees in 19 offices; and Corient then had about 260 partners, rising to about 330 after the deal. Mark Tibergien, a consultant and former chief executive of Pershing Advisor Solutions, called his rationale “Right on point” while warning that “it is dangerous to open too many fronts before consolidating your base”; and the researcher Will Trout said Mubadala “appears to be investing wisely.”⁠[9]

In 2026 he said that soon after the take-private closed Corient announced, on a single day, the purchase of the largest and the second-largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth managers in Europe, a transaction that would have been impossible to execute had it still been a public company. In his view no truly global ultra-high-net-worth wealth manager exists apart from Corient: banks operating in several jurisdictions are merely “multi-jurisdictional,” because they run a series of regional profit-and-loss accounts, map client relationships to a region and have compensation systems that leave the regions unable to collaborate; as an example he said that if a billion-dollar family (currency not stated in the source) with assets in four jurisdictions consolidated all of it in Miami, three regions inside such a firm would lose and one would gain. He said Corient had globalized the private partnership it first built for the U.S. market.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

InvestmentNews wrote on April 29, 2026, that Corient planned to launch in Canada in June of that year, subject to regulatory approval, with about C$10 billion in assets drawn from the previously acquired Northwood Family Office and Coriel Capital and from advisors moving over from CI Private Wealth; that it had an agreement to acquire Bedrock Group, a transaction the article values at roughly $10.7 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets, while other additions brought in about $14 billion collectively; and that client assets were expected to reach roughly $475 billion once the transactions were completed, with roughly C$650 billion managed and administered globally. The article calls him chief executive and founding partner and quotes him: “We see a clear gap in the Canadian market for a global independent wealth manager.”⁠[43]

In the WealthManagement.com Q&A of August 2026 he said that CI Financial and Corient are separate companies, that in Canada CI serves the mass affluent while Corient serves ultra-high-net-worth families, and that the two play in “very distinct segments of the market” and are not really competitors.⁠[17]

Corient announced that it had completed its previously announced acquisitions of Stonehage Fleming and Stanhope Capital Group. The release states that as of June 1, 2026, Corient had about US$508 billion in client assets worldwide, more than 300 partners and over 2,200 employees, serving clients from offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia, and that its Canadian expansion had recently received regulatory approval. The release gives his title as Founding Partner and Chief Executive Officer and quotes him: “This is an exciting moment for Corient and the clients we serve around the world.”⁠[44]

On August 5, 2026, Corient announced that Summit Trail Advisors, a New York-headquartered registered investment advisor focused exclusively on ultra-high-net-worth clients, would join it; the firm was founded in 2015 and managed more than $21 billion (currency not stated in the source) in assets as of March 31, 2026. The transaction was expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, terms were not disclosed, and on closing Summit Trail’s principals would become Corient partners. The release gives Corient more than 300 partners, over 2,700 employees and about US$556 billion in client assets worldwide as of June 30, 2026. It gives his title as Founding Partner and Chief Executive Officer and quotes him: “The decision by a firm of Summit Trail’s caliber to join Corient serves as meaningful validation of our firm’s quality.”⁠[45][46][17]

An article published by RIABiz the next day quotes him as saying that “last week” the firm had announced the acquisition of Seven Bridges, a $5 billion (currency not stated in the source) business in New York, a couple of weeks before that an $8 billion business in Tulsa, and a couple of weeks before that a $5 billion business with Vivaldi in Chicago. He said: “This uniquely puts us in a position not to make trade-offs on the next new opportunity.” The article states that Summit Trail had worked with Dynasty Financial Partners since 2015 and still outsourced some back-office work to it; Will Trout, a senior analyst at Datos Insights, said “There is no long-term symbiosis”; and Dan Seivert, chief executive of ECHELON Partners, said: “Summit Trail is one of the premier entrepreneurial stories in wealth management.”⁠[46]

In a Q&A published by WealthManagement.com the same day he described Corient as a “freestanding private partnership owned and operated by the partners,” and said: “We’ve more than doubled the size of the firm since January”; assets had grown from their level at launch to $550 billion (currency not stated in the source); he also mentioned two further acquisitions, one in Geneva and one in Paris, an $11 billion business and a $5 billion business; and he called what Mubadala Capital provides “permanent strategic capital,” as distinct from private equity capital, which means finding a new sponsor every 24 to 36 months.⁠[17]

On October 18, 2026, David Senra published a conversation with him on his YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel. At the start he introduced himself as a partner and the chief executive of Corient, which he described as the largest multi-family office in the world and the largest non-bank wealth manager serving ultra-high-net-worth clients, managing about $525 billion (currency not stated in the source) of assets on behalf of clients across 15 jurisdictions; David Senra said the two had met in Miami a few weeks earlier.⁠[4]

The conversation moved in turn through: his recruitment as chief executive of CI Financial and the plan he put to the board; why he chose ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, the industry’s “barbell” structure and what he calls its structural flaw; applying the professional services partnership to wealth management; the range of Corient’s services, its aviation business and the fee-only fiduciary standard; the single compensation plan and single profit-and-loss account; why entrepreneurs join, and the ages of its partners and employees.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

The later topics were: the volatility of the share price during the transformation and the shareholder base; building Corient with cash flow and leverage, and the composition of the debt; share buybacks; the call from Mubadala Capital and the take-private; the purchase of the two European firms and his distinction between “global” and “multi-jurisdictional”; what he calls “alignment”; some 50 acquisitions, the three phases of building the business and integration on day one; how the name Corient was chosen; brand and advertising; the choice of Miami as headquarters; and the design of the partnership.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

In the conversation David Senra related how he came to notice the firm: Corient had several times invited him through his website to speak, and he had not replied; later, watching a television interview program, he found that the whole program had a single sponsor and that all four advertising breaks were Corient’s, and only then recalled the name.⁠[4][4][4]

As of November 2026, the executive leadership page of Corient’s website lists him as Partner, Chief Executive Officer, and his biography there states that he is also chief executive and a director of CI Financial and that he developed for Corient a private partnership model in which all partners are equity owners; the homepage of CI Financial’s website lists him as that company’s Chief Executive Officer and Director.⁠[10][47]

CI Financial’s website states that the company is wholly owned by Mubadala Capital, and its homepage gives assets under management of “$550B+” (currency not stated in the source) and more than 2,900 employees, marked as at August 2025. The homepage of Corient’s website gives more than US$550 billion in client assets and more than 300 partners, as of September 30, 2026.⁠[37][47][48]

He said that wealth advice is the ultimate human capital business, and that management consulting firms, law firms, accounting firms and many successful investment and advisory businesses are partnerships, whereas wealth managers were not; in his words Corient created the first true professional services partnership and applied it to the wealth management industry. He said he does not think of it as buying people’s firms: those who join come to be partners of Corient, owning and operating the business alongside him and the other equity partners.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that Corient’s roughly 3,000 people have one compensation plan with no exceptions; that he runs one profit-and-loss account across the firm and does no chargebacks; and that this holds not only in the United States but for everyone worldwide, so that whether a person was hired directly in Seattle or came through an acquisition in San Diego, equal performance is treated in the same way. He said that from the launch he wanted no structural impediment to collaboration.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

He called Corient the only truly conflict-free business in wealth management, built entirely as a fee-only fiduciary business and the largest in the world to operate under that standard of care; lower rates that its scale lets it negotiate for clients are passed on to the clients.⁠[4][4][4]

The services he listed are: wealth advisors who oversee client relationships, global financial planning, wealth transfer, an investment team of 175 people (about 70% on traditional and 30% on alternative investments), several trust companies that the firm owns and operates (using South DakotaSouth DakotaSouth Dakota is a U.S. state bordered by North Dakota to the north, Minnesota and Iowa to the east, Nebraska to the south, and Wyoming and Montana to the west. Its capital is Pierre and its largest city is Sioux Falls. It was admitted to the Union on November 2, 1889, as the 40th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 886,667 residents.Open the full entry in the United States), a tax practice with more than 100 full-time accountants, and a full family office that pays bills and provides outsourced chief financial officer services, customized reporting, concierge lending and the management of complex residential real estate projects, together with an aviation business and an art management business. Of the aviation business he said that the firm owns aircraft on behalf of clients for their collective use, taking the balance sheet risk of buying the asset and the risk of the monthly fee, while clients pay depending on their use.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

He said that a wealth firm can be scaled to three, four or five billion dollars (figures he said he was making up; currency not stated in the source) on wealth advisory and investment services alone, that beyond that clients demand more services, and that getting from there to 50 or 100 billion dollars requires heavy investment, at which point the balance of risk and reward tips for many entrepreneurs; by joining Corient they have immediate use of services that are already built. He said the firm does M&A not to fund retirements but to bring on partners: he put the median advisor in the industry in the early 60s (without, he said, having the exact number), while Corient’s median partner is in the mid-40s and its median employee in the 30s. Corient, he said, tends to be someone’s first choice or their last choice.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

He said Corient had made close to 50 acquisitions since it started; what he looks for is not scale or assets under management but the people and strategic, cultural and financial “alignment,” and whether a deal is 50 billion dollars or 500 million (currency not stated in the source) matters less to him.⁠[4][4]

He divided the building of the business into three phases: about the first 18 months were for accumulating scale and proving the concept, then came the start of integration, and the present is a fully integrated state. He said that a firm joining now is, from day one, on Corient’s brand, technology, offices, collateral, compensation and benefits and collaborating across the firm; he had expected people to be most comfortable with the first phase, which involved the least change, and found instead that they are most comfortable with the present state, because they know exactly what they are getting into.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On brand, he said that the company is six years old and the brand not yet six, and that advertising is first of all about making clients, potential colleagues and potential partners aware of Corient; it advertises where people watch live television and sports, does micro-segmented digital marketing and client experiences, and advertises in every market in which it operates, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and France. He said he is building Corient as the “forever business” in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, whereas financial services, and wealth management in particular, have many “temporary owners” who think about the business in increments of 18 to 36 months.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

He said that when he launched the partnership the goal he set was for the structure and features of the Corient partnership to be better than those of any partnership that had come before, by studying the great partnerships of other industries, taking the best of them and improving the areas he thought ripe for improvement.⁠[4][4]

He said that most of his professional career was spent in New York.⁠[4]

In their conversation David Senra said that the two first met at the home of a mutual friend while training jiu-jitsu, and that he did not know at the time that he was the chief executive of Corient.⁠[4]

He said that he has always been personally ambitious and is a great proponent of doing things one is genuinely passionate about; he said he loves the wealth management industry and loves human capital businesses.⁠[4][4]

When nothing is changing and people feel comfortable is exactly when one should be most uncomfortable; it is better to be the one pushing change forward than to take part in it or react to it (at 15:21).⁠[4]

People benefit from deep, specialized expertise: being deeper and better at one thing typically leads to outsized outcomes; human nature leans toward optionality, but being fine at many things makes it very hard to be world-class at one (at 16:28).⁠[4][4]

Do not compromise on structure, service offering or the way people collaborate when acquiring: each compromise compounds small problems until the business becomes too complicated to reset (at 36:48).⁠[4]

In a human capital business, strategic, cultural and financial alignment is a precondition for reaching the goal, and incentives drive a great deal of behavior (at 57:35).⁠[4]

Working together is worth it only if each side makes the other better; otherwise it is merely a financial transaction (at 1:03:02).⁠[4][4]

When making a decision that brings change, involve as many people as possible and let them see their input reflected: the outcome is better and people embrace the change more readily (at 1:06:18).⁠[4]

Seeing a business on a forever time horizon leads to building its brand very differently from someone who means to own it only for a while (at 1:12:53).⁠[4]

Building something from scratch means studying the mistakes and the successes, one’s own and other people’s, and drawing on the best of them (at 1:17:43).⁠[4]

McKinsey & Company: Official website: https://www.mckinsey.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[49]

WisdomTree: Official website: https://www.wisdomtree.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[50]

CI Financial: Official website: https://www.cifinancial.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[47]

Corient: Official website: https://corient.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[48]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurt-macalpine-0034713 (opens in a new window).⁠[51]