A New Customer Experience Model in Financial Services

Private equity-backed hybrid RIA Trilogy Financial Services has acquired a $1bn shop with a niche serving pilots and aviation professionals.

Trilogy said Thursday it has snapped up Mountain Capital Investment Advisors, located in Westminster in Colorado’s Denver-Boulder corridor. The terms of the transaction, which marks Irvine, Calif.-based Trilogy’s largest acquisition of the year, were not disclosed.

Mountain Capital is led by chief executive Brandt Burns and vice president Michelle Burns, a husband-and-wife duo who co-founded the firm in 2011 alongside founder emeritus Robert Loesch. Brandt Burns is a US Marine Corps veteran who previously worked as an advisor with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney for more than a decade. Before that, he was a commercial pilot at the now-defunct regional airline Atlantic Coast Airlines (later known as Independence Air). Michelle Burns worked for United Airlines for 14 years.

The firm provides financial planning to individual, family and small business clients with a focus on people involved in the aviation industry. It also offers tax preparation services and consulting services for pilots and airline professionals.

Brandt Burns stated that the deal allows Mountain Capital to retain its brand, leadership team, advisors and staff. The company will become Trilogy’s eleventh office and second location in Colorado.

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I’ve sat in those rooms, and you have too. You know the ones, where some war-weary veteran of the good old days of financial services talks about how they used to walk uphill both ways in a blizzard to every client meeting.

How the account application was as small as a postcard. How they didn’t even have calculators and surmised rates of return on the back of a napkin.

We are all told that a return to such days would be a good thing for clients and advisors alike and that all of this technology “stuff” is simply ruining a business that at its core is about helping people save for their future, not do calculus.

But those are not the only rooms.

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