Hightower bets its employee channel on Dispatch's data layer

Hightower Advisors is handing the data layer of its employee channel to Dispatch, a fintech that has raised $28 million and counts more than $9 trillion in client assets on its platform by its own tally. The Chicago-based firm, more than 800 advisors strong, will use Dispatch for advisor transitions, client account opening and management, and data syncing across Hightower Signature Wealth, the nationally branded employee practice launched last year under CEO Larry Restieri.

Signature Wealth has grown to $35 billion in AUM across 30 locations and 100 advisors, and in August announced its second external RIA acquisition to the channel. Every advisor who joins arrives with a book of accounts, and the friction of moving those accounts is what taxes growth. Dispatch's Advisor Transitions product, launched in May, compresses what co-founder and CEO Rob Nance calls a 'thorny, painful, and disjointed' process that can take months.

Under the agreement, Dispatch will move, validate, and synchronize client data across custodians including Schwab and Fidelity, and across advisory systems. Dispatch was among the first third-party providers to use Schwab's API-based account onboarding, letting an advisor start an account opening from inside their CRM and land it in Schwab Advisor Center without rekeying. That is the mechanical definition of a painless move, and it is why the custody handoff is the talent war's new front.

PWD's tracking showed Merit and Hightower pulled nearly $5 billion from LPL's future book last month, the employee channel the part of the book built to scale and Dispatch the infrastructure underneath it.

Dispatch launched in late 2022 as OneAdvisory and rebranded in 2024 after additional seed funding; its client assets on the platform exceed $9 trillion by its most recent count. In August, Dispatch added former Hightower CEO Bob Oros to its board, a sign that this announcement is the product of a relationship that has been building, not a cold procurement.

Hightower is not just buying onboarding software; it is buying the template that makes advisors portable. When client data moves automatically across Schwab and Fidelity, and account opening starts inside a CRM and ends at the custodian without rekeying, the cost of leaving a platform falls. For an employee channel selling itself to advisors who might otherwise stay at a wirehouse or a regional broker-dealer, that lower cost is the pitch. The deal reads less as back-office hygiene and more as recruiting infrastructure.

RIA roll-ups have historically been judged on purchase multiples and retention rates, but the operational throughput underneath those numbers determines whether the model works. A channel that can move an advisor's book in weeks rather than months keeps more of the assets it acquires, and Hightower is using Dispatch to compress that time for every future acquisition. That is the kind of infrastructure an aggregator needs when its growth depends on absorbing teams rather than winning individual accounts one at a time.

Restieri reaches for client language: 'Ultimately, this is about making it easier for our advisors to deliver a great experience to their clients,' he said. 'Dispatch provides the data infrastructure that keeps client information accurate and synchronized across the systems that support the relationship, reducing operational friction for advisors and creating a more seamless experience for clients over time.' The quote is the employee-channel sales script, pitched around the experience rather than the grid.

The recruiting war has moved past wirehouse breakaways into a team sport across fiduciary and employee channels, where every liftout lowers the floor for the next one. Hightower just lowered the floor for its own channel by removing the operational friction that keeps advisors in place. The rest of the roll-up market should read the move the same way: the fight for advisors is moving to the time it takes to open an account, and that favors firms that treat the data layer as a strategic priority rather than an afterthought.