Hightower Advisors, a Chicago, Ill.-based registered investment advisor with $353.7 billion in assets under management, announced it rolled a $9 billion affiliated practice into its Hightower Signature Wealth employee channel.
Altium Wealth is another in a list of Hightower affiliates joining the channel launched in October 2025. Jim Dowling, partner of Purchase, N.Y.-based Altium, was one of seven founders who left broker/dealer Park Avenue Securities to launch the firm in 2010, according to BrokerCheck. They then joined Hightower in 2022.
“Partnering with HTSW is a natural next step in our evolution,” Dowling said in a statement, adding that one of the draws is “additional resources to support our team and continued growth.”
With the move, Altuim’s 10-person investment team will also take an “expanded role” in Hightower’s centralized wealth and investment platform, dubbed Hightower One, according to the announcement. That includes working with other advisors on portfolio construction, asset transitions and client investments.
With Altium’s addition, HTSW now manages more than $50 billion in assets and includes more than 175 advisors across more than 45 locations nationwide.
Growing a unified, branded division has been a goal of CEO Larry Restieri since he took the job in June 2025. Altium will be another sign that the internal roll-up strategy is working, alongside some external joiners.
In a statement, Restieri said the firm’s addition “reflects our vision for HTSW: bringing together established wealth management firms, preserving the qualities that have made them successful and creating opportunities to leverage their experience and capabilities across the broader organization.”
Focus Financial Partners, which also grew to a national scale with a network of partner RIAs, started its own consolidation strategy in 2024 under the direction of CEO Michael Nathanson. That plan has seen about 90 independently operated firms join a handful of hub firms with at least some reference to the Focus name. Nathanson left the CEO role in December, 2025 to become chairman of the board, while former president Adam Birenbaum took the top job.
Hightower’s Restieri, who previously led Goldman Sachs’ Ayco business, has also made several new hires since taking over at the RIA, which is majority-owned by the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee.
Not all of those hires have lasted. Most recently, former Chief Operating Officer Patrick Dunne left after a little over a year at the firm, announcing this week he had taken a role as head of wealth and asset management at wealth data platform Dispatch.
This summer, President Roberto Stewart stepped down after three months in the role for personal reasons and was later replaced by Marco De Freitas.