CircleBlack names Robertson Stephens COO Vikram Chugh as CEO

CircleBlack has named Vikram Chugh chief executive, pulling him from the chief operating officer role at Robertson Stephens, Wealth Management reported on Oct. 20. Both firms are owned by Long Arc Capital, and Chugh, who spent more than eight years as Robertson Stephens' COO, will keep an advisory role at the firm he left.

He succeeds Lincoln Ross, CircleBlack's president and CEO from 2022 until his departure earlier this year for The Pacific Financial Group, where he is now president. Ross stays with CircleBlack as a strategic advisor. CircleBlack sells a digital wealth management platform to advisors. For scale, PWD's records list Robertson Stephens at $8.8 billion in regulatory assets, 8,592 accounts and 118 employees.

When Ross took over in 2022, it marked CircleBlack's third leadership change in three years, after Alex Sauickie succeeded founder and CEO John Michel following Michel's death in 2020, per Wealth Management's reporting. In the interview, Chugh declined to say how many advisors use CircleBlack's technology or how large the team is, and declined to comment on AssetBook, the performance-reporting company Wealth Management reported last year that CircleBlack was set to acquire.

CircleBlack plans to add product and engineering staff to build out artificial intelligence features that make fragmented data more accessible and workflows more automated, Chugh said. Chugh said CircleBlack has spent recent years modernizing the platform and building deeper integrations with a select group of partner firms. The move puts an operator from an $8.8 billion advisory business in charge of selling software to advisors.