NewEdge's Midwest offices are recruiting infrastructure

NewEdge Wealth has opened offices in Minnesota and Ohio within weeks of each other, adding teams that managed a combined $1.75 billion in client assets and carrying NewEdge Capital Group's wealth division to 22 locations nationwide. Tennessee, Georgia and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, all got new offices recently, and NewEdge climbed to No. 2 on Barron's 2026 Top 100 RIA Firms list — its highest placement since it debuted at No. 29 in 2022. A ranking like that functions as a recruiting document as much as an accolade, and the past year of openings reads like a firm spending it.

PWD's records put NewEdge Wealth at roughly $19.9 billion in regulatory assets under management across 19,593 accounts, with 211 employees and 40 registered representatives. The $1.75 billion arriving from these two teams is less than a tenth of that book; firms this size do not pay up for assets they can already gather, but for the people who gather them.

The Wayzata office, west of Minneapolis, is led by James Shafer as a managing director and Michael Block as a principal, with Joseph Gossett, Pamela Smith and Rachelle Carlson-Oien joining as vice presidents and three colleagues in support roles. NewEdge puts the group's previous book at more than $1.25 billion and describes its work as wealth transfer, multi-generational planning and tax-efficient management of significant assets for clients around Minneapolis.

The New Albany office, announced Sept. 9, is led by Lance White, a managing director whose three decades in the industry run through private wealth management, capital markets, technology investing and venture capital, with earlier tenures at Morgan Stanley and UBS. He co-founded New Albany Wealth Management Group at Morgan Stanley, and Shane Moran and Wendy Chance joined with him. Minnesota accounts for more than $1.25 billion of the total, so the Ohio book comes to at most roughly $500 million by subtraction; the coverage does not put a figure on the New Albany book itself.

White's résumé is the more unusual of the two, stitching capital markets, technology investing and venture capital into three decades of wealth work; read plainly, that history suggests the New Albany office is as much a source of founder and private-market relationships as it is a book of business — a different kind of hiring than a straight asset liftout.

Forty registered representatives carrying $19.9 billion works out to roughly $500 million per rep, a density that holds only if the firm supplies the technology, the investment shelf and the back office the teams would otherwise build for themselves. Shafer's stated reason for moving was exactly that: "we needed a partner who could provide the technology, support and investment options to support our next phase of growth."

In August, LPL, Cetera, Raymond James and NewEdge pulled about $534 million of disclosed client assets into the independent channel in a single four-firm week, and in early September NewEdge alone moved four Fort Lauderdale teams carrying roughly $3 billion each, lifting the week's disclosed advisor AUM in motion to $19.8 billion. Whole practices are moving as single units, and the winner takes the clients, the referral network and the reference call that helps close the next team.

What a prospect in Wayzata or New Albany can check is whether comparably sized teams already sit on the platform and whether they stayed — a reference no recruiter can manufacture, and the reason these two offices exist in the first place. A firm with 22 locations and a No. 2 ranking is selling something specific to a team that has spent decades in one market: peers.

NewEdge Wealth serves ultra-high-net-worth and high-net-worth families, family offices and institutional clients, and InvestmentNews, which first reported the openings, notes that advisors working with those clients are gravitating toward the RIA model for its fiduciary alignment and flexibility. Rob Sechan, founder and managing partner of NewEdge Capital Group, said the Minnesota group "built a practice that puts clients first" and called it the anchor for the new office. Every acquirer says something like it; the phrase that gets tested is continuity, and the test runs years out, when the partners who built those relationships hand them on.

Both offices are staffed by people with decades in the business, and the Minnesota group's specialty — wealth transfer and multi-generational planning — describes the work that outlives the partners who originate it. A firm bringing in teams like these is underwriting a decade of client relationships whose renewal depends on the bench behind the founders, which makes integration capacity, rather than the disclosed book, the thing worth watching.

Tennessee, Georgia and Fort Lauderdale came first; Wayzata and New Albany follow. The next thing to count at NewEdge is the bench — whether the firm hires behind Shafer, Block and White at anything like the pace it hired them.