Prosperity imports a tax-firm president as the C-suite talent war moves to the platform

Prosperity, the New York-based RIA owned by accounting and consultancy firm EisnerAmper Co., has replaced President Michelle Martin with Jeff Lenhart, a partner from tax and auditing firm Forvis Mazars whose previous job was Southeast regional leader of the firm's national wealth management practice. Martin, who remains as partner and senior wealth advisor, grew the EisnerAmper wealth arm from $1.2 billion to $5.7 billion since March 2023, and Lenhart now holds a mandate spanning leadership, strategic direction, and long-term growth of the wealth management business. The résumé marks him as an integration executive rather than a book builder.

Hiring the president from another accounting firm's wealth practice turns tax-adjacent expertise into a C-suite credential in its own right. Accounting firms have spent years building or buying RIAs; now they are exporting the executives who ran them, and Prosperity is effectively betting that the integration of tax, audit, and advice is the growth strategy — and that the person who managed that integration for a rival can manage it at EisnerAmper.

The platform side of the talent war is not slowing down, and LPL Financial's hire of Jonathan Lewis as managing director and chief technology and information officer from Wells Fargo—where he was head of digital and trading technology and previously led asset management technology at J.P. Morgan—makes the point. Reporting to Greg Gates, promoted to group managing director and chief product and technology officer, Lewis will lead technology architecture, engineering, infrastructure, and development.

Lewis is based in New York, not LPL's San Diego headquarters, and his mandate becomes concrete within months: LPL will transition advisors from Commonwealth Financial Network to its wealth platform in the fourth quarter, after acquiring the independent broker-dealer last year. Gates said the hire would accelerate LPL's investments in AI and platform modernization around the Latitude technology experience. As this publication has argued, the custody handoff is the new front in the talent war; the first Commonwealth advisor to log in after the transition will be touching Lewis's systems.

U.S. Bank has promoted Chris Peary to chief private banking officer for wealth management, giving him oversight of the firm's private banking platform for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients. Peary had been national banking lead and West region banking manager for Ascent Private Capital Management of U.S. Bank, the firm's ultra-high-net-worth unit, and the promotion puts banking, credit, and wealth solutions under a single officer — an acknowledgment that the bank's platform, not any one advisor, is the product.

This is the infrastructure layer of the C-suite talent war: tax workflow at Prosperity, the technology stack at LPL, the bank balance sheet at U.S. Bank. Each hire puts one executive in charge of the plumbing beneath advisors. The next test is the fourth quarter, when Commonwealth advisors log into LPL Latitude and Lewis's work becomes the first thing they touch. Prosperity's tax-adjacent bet and U.S. Bank's platform consolidation will take longer to judge.