Oppenheimer's Berry hire buys access to the NIL era

Oppenheimer & Co. has hired Joel Berry II, the former North Carolina men's basketball captain and 2017 NCAA champion, as a financial advisor in its Winston-Salem office, InvestmentNews reports, and what the firm is really hiring is a face current college athletes already know from the ACC Network.

Berry joins the Robinson Private Client Group, the team led by Tanner Robinson that manages more than $6 billion in client assets for high-net-worth individuals, athletes, institutions, and corporations, and the group has been deepening its work with current and former athletes as name, image, and likeness deals and revenue-sharing arrangements reshape college sports finances.

Berry comes to Oppenheimer from Truist Financial, where he worked with professional players and with high school and collegiate athletes navigating the financial complexities that followed the NCAA's 2021 decision to allow athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness, and his own biography—four-year starter at UNC, Final Four Most Outstanding Player in the Tar Heels' 2017 championship run, a later professional career, and a current role as an ACC Network commentator—does work no credential can replicate. Ed Harrington, head of Oppenheimer's Private Client Division, framed the hire as consistent with the firm's broader approach to advisor development.

The move reads as a business-development hire at least as much as a production play. At $6 billion in client assets, the Robinson group does not need another advisor's book; it needs the meeting a recognizable former player can get with a current student-athlete that a traditional advisor cannot, because NIL has created a client class with sudden income, tax obligations, and careers that can be shortened by injury. Berry's ongoing role on the ACC Network keeps him in the same orbit as those athletes and their families, and that makes him a door-opener as much as an advisor.

Truist loses an advisor with a rare combination of on-court credibility and NIL-era experience, a profile still thin in the industry and becoming more valuable as the money in college sports grows, and the hire fits the broader recruiting market this publication has argued is now a team sport across employee and fiduciary channels rather than a wirehouse breakaway contest. Direct athletic experience is being recruited to serve a client base financial planners once struggled to reach, and Oppenheimer is building a specialty team in an employee channel where the currency is a name and the trust it carries—a different asset than the production grids that typically drive team moves.

The next few recruiting cycles will show whether that bet—that the NIL channel is durable enough to support a dedicated athlete practice inside a traditional private client firm—pays out in client counts before it shows up on any balance sheet. Rivals can answer with recognizable faces of their own, or the Robinson Group's head start becomes a durable edge visible in client counts rather than balance sheets.