First Western Financial

First Western Financial

Chairman and CEO Scott C. Wylie founded First Western Financial in 2002 with two partners in Denver, Colorado. The firm began as a trust and estate planning boutique, expanding methodically into investment management and private banking over two decades. It went public on the NASDAQ in 2018 under the ticker MYFW, a rare move for a regional wealth manager, giving it acquisition currency and permanent capital that most privately held trust companies lack. The firm's investment platform deploys client capital across three primary streams: a direct portfolio management business running individual fixed-income and equity portfolios, a third-party manager due-diligence program that selects external strategies, and a proprietary suite of internally managed strategies covering large-cap equities and tax-sensitive municipal bonds. Wylie has stated publicly that the internal strategies are designed as cost-efficient building blocks for trust accounts, not as performance-chasing vehicles. The firm operates in Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, and California, serving approximately 3,000 households and institutional clients, with a depository base that funds a mortgage division and commercial lending arm. First Western reported $7.1 billion in total client assets across its wealth and trust segments in 2023, with roughly $2.5 billion in advisory and managed accounts and the remainder in custody and corporate trust (per the firm, 2023). The firm employs over 300 people across 19 offices, concentrated in affluent mountain-west communities like Jackson Hole, Scottsdale, and Aspen. In February 2024, Wylie announced a strategic initiative to consolidate fragmented trust operations onto a single technology stack, aiming to improve margins in the trust division by 2025 (per the firm's Q4 2023 earnings call, February 2024). Unlike many peers that sold to national consolidators, Wylie has maintained independence through a dual-class share structure that grants him majority voting control. First Western's structural differentiator is its charter stacking: a state-chartered trust company, a registered investment advisor, and a FDIC-insured bank under one public-company roof. This architecture allows the firm to cross-sell fiduciary services, investment management, and lending to the same client, generating a blended revenue model that regional RIA competitors without a banking license cannot replicate. Succession remains an open question — Wylie holds the roles of Chairman, CEO, and President, and no named heir apparent has been disclosed.