Paul Trippe, a former managing director and market investment executive at U.S. Trust/Bank of America Private Bank, has come out of retirement to join Fidelis Capital, a Tampa-based registered investment advisor launched about three years ago with just under $2 billion in assets under advisement. He will serve as a partner.
Trippe, who previously managed more than $2 billion in client assets at Bank of America before his retirement in December 2023, served U.S. Trust/BofA Private Bank for 31 years. Several of Fidelis’s leadership team also came out of BofA Private Bank and knew him, including founding partners Neale and Matt Ellis.
Trippe said he decided to come out of retirement to work with these folks again, but he was also drawn to the firm’s model of limiting the number of client relationships per advisor to 25 or fewer.
“You don’t always have that luxury at a large institution, but you do have that luxury here. And that’s really what drew me to it,” he said. “I had a lot of experience with these families. They want and expect constant contact, and that was not always possible before. But now it is.”
Over time, he will contact some of the families he previously worked with to invite them to Fidelis.
“The things that drove him to that decision [to come out of retirement] are very consistent with the very basic tenets of our firm,” said Rick Simonetti, founding partner, CEO and head of wealth planning at Fidelis. “We’re committed to limiting the number of clients every advisor serves, to putting in place an advisory team of industry-respected professionals and executives, and to bring to bear a level of horsepower you can’t typically find.”
“He has a group of families that he’s served for decades, and he cares about them and wants them to have a place where they’ll have a long-term home at a multi-generational advisory firm that will care for them for as far as one can see out in the future,” Simonetti added.
Fidelis was created in August 2022 when two teams of advisors from Wells Fargo Private Bank and Bank of America Private Bank came together. The teams wanted to bring private banking services to the independent space at a time when the big institutions were cutting back on those services.
Since launching, the firm has added a number of professionals; in September 2023, it added a five-person team advising on more than $4.5 billion in client assets from Bank of America Private Bank. That team opened a Fidelis office in Washington, D.C.
That same month, the RIA hired Christopher Gunster from Bank of America Corp. as head of fixed income. Gunster has built out a proprietary direct indexing capability for fixed income.
And about a year ago, the RIA hired Douglas Rothermich, who built out TIAA’s high-net-worth planning group, as a partner and wealth strategist. Rothermich has been expanding Fidelis’ planning capabilities.
Simonetti expects Fidelis to reach over $2 billion in client assets by the end of the year and approach $2.5 billion by the middle of 2026.
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