Wellington-Altus USA

Wellington-Altus USA

Wellington-Altus USA emerged from the 2017 launch of Wellington-Altus Private Wealth in Canada, a firm backed by a minority investment from Canadian insurance giant Great-West Lifeco. Shaun Hauser leads the US registered investment advisor from New York, extending the parent brand's advisory model to American-based clients and cross-border families. The firm traces its roots to the breakaway movement of Canadian advisors from bank-owned dealers, a wave that also birthed Richardson Wealth and CI Financial's rapid US roll-up — though Wellington-Altus chose a slower, organic path into the US. The firm operates as a traditional discretionary and non-discretionary wealth manager, serving individuals, trusts, estates, corporations and business entities. Its investment posture is anchored in portfolio management and financial planning, with a distinct cross-border capability that differentiates it from purely domestic US RIAs. While Wellington-Altus Canada has built a national network of advisory teams managing substantial private client assets, the US entity remains comparatively lean, functioning as a regulated access point for clients with bi-national wealth structures. Specific asset-class allocations, discretionary AUM levels and named portfolio holdings are not publicly disclosed. The US operation reflects the parent firm's advisor-centric architecture — Wellington-Altus Canada is structured as an independent partnership model where advisors hold equity and governance influence. This ethos extends to the US RIA conceptually, though the New York office's team size and scope remain opaque. The Canadian parent has been among the fastest-growing wealth managers in that country, attracting advisor teams from bank-owned dealers by offering partnership and autonomy, a narrative that likely underpins the US subsidiary's service proposition for cross-border advisors and their clients. Structurally, Wellington-Altus USA is an RIA registered with the SEC, nested within a corporate lineage that includes a Canadian dealer member of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada. This parallel regulatory posture is the firm's structural differentiator: an SEC-registered investment advisor that is operationally tethered to a Canadian IIROC member firm, creating a compliance framework for managing assets across both jurisdictions rather than referring clients to external cross-border specialists.