Abby Salameh, who stepped down from her role as Hightower’s chief marketing officer in February, has landed at CAIS, an alternative investment platform to the wealth management industry. Salameh will serve as CMO of the company, starting Nov. 8, and report to CAIS founder and CEO Matt Brown.
When Salameh left Hightower at the beginning of the year, she thought she would retire from the wealth management industry. “I just couldn’t sit still for that long,” she said in an interview with WealthManagement.com.
A few months ago, Salameh started searching for her next opportunity, and said she could be selective in choosing her next company. She spoke with about 20 different firms, targeting fintechs and ones that were forward-thinking in how they were delivering services to financial advisors.
“Having built a couple of large RIA firms, I just felt like it was time for me to do something a little bit different and to serve the RIAs in a different capacity,” Salameh said.
She said she was drawn to CAIS, which didn’t have a CMO, because the company was leveraging scale and tech to help advisors gain access to alternative investments for their clients.
“I believe in the mission of getting these diverse investment solutions in the hands of advisors so that they can use them for their clients,” she said. “If you look at the retail investor, the high-net-worth investor, so many of them don’t have a diverse portfolio, and they really need to be uncorrelated to the markets and the stocks and the bonds, and this is a way that we can help them do that.”
Salameh will be responsible for building on the CAIS brand and growth trajectory. She may also get involved in business strategy and M&A work.
“The first thing I’ll probably do is take a look at, does the brand represent the mission of the company?” she said. “And if it doesn’t represent the mission of the company, do a quick check on what the industry thinks of CAIS, and then synthesize the research and then make sure that the messaging is articulating what the brand’s vision and mission is, and then really building out a world-class marketing organization that can help drive the adoption of alternative investments and the education piece, which is so important. Because you are talking about complex investment solutions.”
Salameh says she’ll bring a different viewpoint to CAIS, having served at large RIA firms herself. Prior to Hightower, she served as CMO of Private Advisor Group, a hybrid RIA firm and super OSJ of LPL Financial. Prior to that, she was a senior vice president with Kestra Financial.