Stirlingshire Investments Prepares for Rapid Growth with Hadrius

Stirlingshire Investments CEO Steven Woods isn’t shy about where his firm is headed.

“My goal is to change the industry,” Woods says from his Manhattan office. “We’re building a platform designed to deliver a better experience for both clients and advisors. I’m not going to be able to do that in a vacuum.”

Founded in 2020, Stirlingshire is an RIA and broker-dealer building a full-service, technology-first alternative to the traditional wealth management model. Now its roster is adding some heavyweight industry talent.

On Thursday, Stirlingshire named Dan Arnold, the former CEO of LPL Financial, as Executive Chairman. Arnold will serve in an active leadership role to help the firm scale from 40 advisors today toward a goal of 5,000 over the next five years. “We're taking all of his learnings and building them into the system,” Woods says.

Stirlingshire also debuted Candice Gilman, former Chief Compliance Officer of SoFi Wealth, as its new CCO. And earlier this summer, the firm launched Stirling One, a vertically integrated platform that pulls prospecting, marketing, trading, rebalancing, reporting, and execution into a single login for advisors.

For a firm rebuilding nearly every part of its technology stack in-house, one decision stands out: the compliance layer stays with Hadrius.

“Hadrius is at the tip of the spear when it comes to compliance technology,” says Woods. “Whenever we think about all the other products in the market, we say, ‘We're going to build that capability ourselves.’ But Hadrius is amazing.”

Hadrius was the one tool the firm chose to keep as they enter a period of rapid growth and vendor consolidation. The reason comes down to what Stirlingshire is trying to build. 

The firm’s “advice on demand” pioneers a hybrid, AI-native model of wealth management geared towards a new generation, right as Millennials and Gen Z investors are set to take custody of more than $60 trillion in wealth over the next twenty years. The model lets clients self-direct their investment by default and access a professional advisor when they need one, with no asset-management fee on those individual recommendations; only a fee tied to the eventual sale of the assets. In other words, the firm’s compensation ties directly to the utility of the advice given. 

Every recommendation is checked against the client’s risk tolerance and investment objectives, and that information flows into Hadrius to support the firm's supervision and Reg BI adherence.

For a compliance team, that automation moves a large share of the review and documentation work into a system built to handle it, so the CCO’s office can keep pace with a firm scaling fast.

“Hadrius makes their lives super easy,” Woods said of his compliance team. “That takes stuff off my plate.”