Mercer Global Advisors, one of the nation’s largest and most acquisitive registered investment advisors with $69 billion in assets, has hired Alisa Maute as executive managing director and head of client development, a newly created role. Maute joins from LPL Financial, where she most recently served as head of investment product management and retirement and head of advisor growth prior to that.
In the new role, Maute will lead Mercer’s client development team, which has doubled in size over the past two years to more than 100 professionals. This team is dedicated to identifying prospective clients, determining whether Mercer is a good fit for those families and matching them to the right advisor within the firm. Maute has also joined Mercer’s executive leadership team, reporting to President Daniel Gourvitch. Gourvitch said Mercer’s growth from new clients, meaning assets or revenue that new clients have added, was up 50% from 2023 to 2024. And that figure is trending higher in the first quarter of 2025.
“Interestingly, while Mercer has been and continues to be hugely successful as a partnership of firms that decided to join together—what people talk about as M&A—we’re actually at this point adding even more families to Mercer and revenue to Mercer from organic new clients than from that very successful partnership strategy,” Gourvitch said.
Maute said the firm aspires to serve even more clients. To do so, she’ll focus on new avenues of growth, optimize the processes they have in place and deliver a better client experience through the advisor matching process.
The firm’s client development function consists of teams that focus on custodial partners and those focused on the community and direct channels. Bryan Powers leads the community and direct client development teams, while Will Mannon leads the custodial partner teams. They will continue in those roles, reporting to Maute.
Within those teams, there are regional vice presidents, who do the initial work to identify prospective clients and match them with advisors, Gourvitch said. They’re organized into teams based on the source of the client. Then, there are folks who support the onboarding experience once a client decides to join the firm.
That separation of the advisor from the prospecting function was something that attracted Maute to the firm.
“Over my 25-year career, I’ve sat across from a lot of advisors in all different channels, and one of the things that I noticed is oftentimes they struggle when they wear lots of different hats,” she said. “They’re business development; they’re trying to deliver great advice; they’re trying to build portfolios. When I came across Mercer, and I talked to many of the large RIAs out there, I felt that it was such a unique experience to have that separation between client development and the financial advisors delivering advice. The fact that these advisors can spend all their time caring for their clients and doing the right thing for their clients without having to spend time growing their business I found really unique. It just feels like it’s a really good model for the future.”
Maute spent the first 20 years of her career in asset management distribution, including 13 years building sales teams at WisdomTree. In 2021, LPL tapped her to lead its organic growth efforts and oversee the consulting teams that help them deliver services to their clients.
Mercer has made a number of key leadership changes in the last year.
Last February, the firm brought on Gün Keresteci as chief financial officer. He joined from McKinsey & Company, where he was global head of finance.
In September, the RIA hired Elizabeth Hioe, another former McKinsey executive, as its new chief people officer.
And in October, Dave Barton, vice chairman of M&A at Mercer Advisors, retired from his role to concentrate his energy on an ongoing health issue, the company said. Martine Lellis, the firm’s former chief talent officer until she was promoted to principal of M&A partner development in May, has taken on Barton’s role.
