Abby Salameh, who stepped down from her role as chief growth officer of RFG Advisory in December, has landed at Mercer Global Advisors, taking on the role of managing partner for the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware region, effective March 2.
The firm has also hired Chris Walters, the former chief advisory officer at Savant Wealth Management, as managing partner for the San Diego region.
Mercer, which has $96 billion in assets, created the managing partner role about a year ago. The firm now has some 21 individuals in those posts, overseeing growth in markets across the country.
“They recognized that they really needed to bring leadership in at this level to be able to tell Daniel (Gourvitch) and Dave (Welling) what the business needs are at a grassroots level because they became very big and really needed to rely upon experts in the industry that understand what it takes for an advisor to be successful,” Salameh said.
Mercer’s managing partners work with financial advisors in their regions to raise awareness and help them access the firm’s resources. That includes its centralized investment management, advanced financial planning, tax and estate specialists and operational infrastructure. Part of her role, Salameh said, will also be seeking advisors to join Mercer.
“This managing partner is very much a role that allows me to do what I love to do, which is help advisors serve their clients better and to mentor and lead a team of highly established, successful financial advisors so that they can better serve their clients in a way that’s super different than anything I’ve done before,” she said. “What I mean by that is, Mercer really has already built the foundation of a family office for every family. Internally, the resources that are available to the advisors to help them better serve their clients are like none other I have seen in the industry.”
And Salameh gets to do it from her home state of New Jersey, without being on planes all the time, which she cited as a pain point for her at RFG.
RFG hired Salameh in March 2024 to oversee advisor recruitment, marketing and organic growth initiatives for the firm’s partner practices. Before joining RFG, Salameh was the chief marketing officer at CAIS, the alternatives platform. Prior to that, she spent about two years as chief marketing officer for Hightower and six years in the same role at Private Advisor Group, a hybrid RIA and super office of supervisory jurisdiction of LPL Financial. Prior to that, she was senior vice president and CMO of Fusion Advisor Network.
Walters left Savant in 2024, as part of a reorganization of senior leadership at the RIA. Prior to joining Savant in 2020, he was a managing director for the western region at GenSpring Family Offices. He also founded Lighthouse Wealth Advisory, a consulting practice dedicated to family offices and wealth management firms.