Los Angeles-headquartered Haven Tower Group, the multiple award-winning, full-service communications agency focused on the wealth management industry, announced a new exclusive strategic alliance with Cardinal Communications Strategies, a strategic financial communications firm serving private equity sponsors across media relations, executive positioning, content strategy and digital marketing.
The new strategic alliance – called the Cardinal Haven Initiative – is designed to support private equity firms investing in wealth management and the wealth management enterprises they acquire and build. It pairs Haven Tower’s industry-specific expertise across RIAs, hybrids, dual registrants, family offices and wealth platforms with Cardinal’s deep experience helping private equity firms communicate clearly, consistently and credibly in markets that are intensely competitive in capturing high-quality deal flow.
While closely collaborating via the Cardinal Haven Initiative, both Haven Tower and Cardinal Communications will continue as stand-alone, independent firms under their longstanding leadership teams, operations, strategic visions and brand identities in all other areas of their respective businesses.
“We’ve seen a recurring dynamic in the market,” said Joe Kuo, founder & CEO of Haven Tower Group and managing partner and co-founder of Ascentix Partners. “Private equity firms active in wealth management often retain agencies that do a great job for PE generally – but wealth management isn’t their daily world. Then portfolio companies feel stuck, because they need a partner that’s fully immersed in the advisor ecosystem. This alliance fixes that problem.”
The Cardinal Haven Initiative builds on a longstanding relationship between Kuo and Marc Raybin, founder & president of Cardinal Communications. The two have known one another and worked together many times over the past two decades, starting during Kuo’s time as a partner at the global agency now known as Kekst CNC and while Raybin was a journalist covering the private equity industry.
“This is really a natural outgrowth of a relationship built on mutual trust and respect,” Kuo added. “Marc and I come at this from different sides of the market – his deep private equity communications background and our singular focus on wealth management – and that combination is exactly what private equity sponsors and their portfolio companies need right now.”
“Our Cardinal Haven Initiative is an exciting alliance that addresses multiple practical needs on both sides of any private equity transaction in the wealth management space. It’s also a strategic partnership that has happened very organically, as part of a relationship between each other built over many years,” said Raybin. “Sponsors want sponsor-level communications rigor, and portfolio companies want an agency that truly understands their industry. Haven Tower brings that wealth management fluency, and we bring private equity communications discipline. Together we can support both, without either firm changing who it is.”
The Haven Tower-Cardinal alliance aims to support communications needs across the full lifecycle of private equity ownership in wealth management – from pre-deal narrative positioning and sponsor visibility to integration, growth communications and ultimately exit readiness.
“We’re building the Haven Tower Alliance around a simple design principle: specialization wins,” said Larry Roth, Board chairman of Haven Tower Group and founder & managing partner of Ascentix Partners. “Cardinal’s private equity communications strength, combined with Haven Tower’s wealth management focus, creates a clearer and more effective model for sponsors and portfolio companies than what most generalist agencies can deliver. Since Ascentix Partners has longstanding strategic consulting and M&A advisory relationships with private equity firms investing in wealth management, we’re uniquely positioned to help this alliance accelerate in a way that’s tightly connected to how sponsors actually drive value.”
Haven Tower Group is also a strategic partner of Ascentix Partners, a consortium of elite consultancies delivering growth consulting, M&A advisory, technology and operations, outsourced compliance supervision and brand elevation to the wealth management industry. Ascentix Partners is headquartered in New York City with a significant presence in Los Angeles.
Information for this article was sourced from Haven Tower Group.
