New Carte Wealth president wants to take dealer to $50B

This article was updated on May 30 to reflect new information from Carte Wealth.

Maria Jose Flores, chief compliance officer with Carte Wealth Management Inc., has been appointed the firm’s new president. Flores will retain her role as chief compliance officer, and the firm will appoint a co-chief compliance officer in the coming months.

Flores’s appointment as president was effective Tuesday. She takes over from Kirk Purai, who will remain president and CEO of the firm’s MGA arm, Carte Risk Management Inc., as well as CEO of Carte Wealth Management.*

“What I’m doing is dividing my responsibilities,” Purai told Advisor’s Edge. He noted that both Carte Wealth and Carte Risk Management are experiencing “significant growth,” so the company needed someone whose sole focus would be growing a specific line of the business. “What I decided to do was to have one person focus [Carte Wealth’s] growth [and] business strategy, and potential acquisitions that we have coming up.”

Carte Wealth plans to acquire at least three mutual fund dealers this year, although no deals have been finalized, Purai said. One of Flores’s main goals is to grow the dealer’s assets under administration to $50 billion in the next five years from the current $2 billion.

The firm also is looking to hire about 110 advisors. Purai noted they hope to entice independent advisors by highlighting their investments in technology and marketing.

Flores said Carte Wealth will be upgrading its customer relationship management software over the next six to eight months. Following this upgrade, advisors will be able to use the software to review client documents, implement client meeting notes and view details about clients’ RRSP contribution limits, holdings and market value.

Further, Carte provides advisors with software from financial planning technology firm Conquest, which will enable advisors to generate projections about their client’s retirement, identifies any funding shortfalls and suggests solutions to correct them.

On the marketing side, Carte Wealth partnered with fintech Broadridge Financial Solutions in December 2021. Broadridge’s technology now allows Carte Wealth planners to edit aspects of their websites, such as their banners, and a notification will be sent to Carte Wealth’s compliance department for approval, Flores said.

Carte Wealth is also looking to grow its presence in the credit union space, with Flores noting there’s in between 5,000 to 10,000 credit unions in Ontario alone. Several of those credit unions don’t have either the technological resources or the registration to offer wealth products, she said.

In January, Rapport Credit Union joined Carte’s network in January, and Purai said three more are set to come on board this year.

*The original version of this story included a statement from Kirk Purai indicating that there would be no CEO of Carte Wealth Management. The company has since advised that Kirk Purai will retain his CEO title. Return to the updated sentence.