A former managing director at Wilmington Trust who oversaw $11 billion in assets has joined Calamos Wealth Management, a subsidiary of Calamos Investments, the Naperville, Illinois, money manager.
Frazer Rice, an attorney who spent more than 15 years at Wilmington Trust advising roughly 70 families, will be a senior wealth strategist at Calamos Wealth Management, which manages $1.6 billion and caters to high-net-worth clients and professional athletes.
In his new role at the Calamos office in New York, Rice will work directly with clients and institutions and be a resource for advisors in the firm's other offices, he told WealthManagement.com. The firm also has an outpost in Miami.
Rice said the expertise of Calamos Investments coupled with a relatively small wealth manager, at least in terms of employees, attracted him to the firm. It has only 32 employees and 13 advisors.
But he was also seeking an opportunity to be more outspoken about the industry and entrepreneurial, something that's harder to accomplish at larger firms, he said. After leaving Wilmington Trust last fall, Rice authored Wealth, Actually: Intelligent Decision-Making for the 1%, a book derived from industry anecdotes to help wealthy readers navigate common issues. He also produced a blog and podcast before he decided to join Calamos in February.
"Part of what I thought was important is that there is a lot of individuality and personality that is going to be going into wealth management and that is the way forward," Rice said. "I took a very nontraditional transition approach. I bet on myself and I've got very strong opinions on a lot of different things. But Calamos, to me, was an environment where I could bring my opinions and my expertise and they would be supported and challenged, but in a sense would allow me to do my thing."
His experience in estate planning and "maverick" attitude—a trait the firm says it looks for in new employees—were among the reasons Geoffrey Sargeant, a friend who left Neuberger Berman to join Calamos in December, encouraged Rice to join the growing firm.
Calms only recently started expanding its New York office, where there are now four advisors, including Rice, in part to keep the client-to-advisor ratio low.
"It's been some evolution in the last 10 years," said Stephen Perl, the Calamos advisor who opened the New York-based office. "The client base, certainly around the Northeast, has exploded, and the complexity of the offering has done the same."
The company that became Calamos Investments was founded in 1977, but it had no wealth management presence in New York until a decade ago, when the firm purchased a hedge fund and inherited a Rockefeller Center office with a private roof garden. Among all three offices, the firm manages more than $20 billion.