David Senra · Oct 18, 2026 · 1h 20m · 71m saved
With Kurt MacAlpine, Partner and CEO, Corient
Corient manages about $525 billion for ultra-high-net-worth families across 15 jurisdictions, and Kurt MacAlpine, its partner and CEO, told David Senra on his interview show that he built it against the way the rest of the industry pays its advisors.
At most wealth firms, advisors work as independent contractors under a shared brand and earn more for keeping clients and information to themselves. Corient pays every advisor under one compensation plan and runs the whole firm on one profit-and-loss statement, the way law and consulting partnerships do.
"Most wealth businesses are built to serve advisors. We wanted to build a wealth business that was built to serve clients." — Kurt MacAlpine
Kurt became CEO of CI Financial, a Toronto-listed asset manager, at 39 with no previous experience running a company. He launched Corient inside CI in April 2020 and took the business private with Mubadala Capital in August 2025.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 20 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
Most wealth advisors are independent contractors who compete with colleagues for clients and can take clients from each other
Corient runs one compensation plan and one firmwide P&L, with no chargebacks between teams and no exceptions
Global banks' regional P&Ls penalize advisors when a client moves assets into another region of the same bank
Independent advisory firms stall once adding tax, trust and family-office services costs the owner more than it returns
CI's stock went from one of the best North American financial stocks in 2021 to the second-worst in 2022
Mubadala Capital took the company private with no new debt, after telling Kurt a buyback of the remaining shares would take about 9 years
Weeks after going private, Corient agreed in one day to buy Europe's two largest ultra-high-net-worth wealth managers
1. From Mutual Funds to $525B
Kurt took over CI Financial at 39. Its earnings came almost entirely from one business that was losing ground to ETFs and alternative investments, even as it still produced several hundred million dollars a year of EBITDA.
Kurt MacAlpine says CI's profits rested on a single Canadian mutual fund business
"The primary business was Canadian asset management... economically, the entire profitability of the firm was derived effectively from the Canadian mutual fund business." — Kurt MacAlpine
His pitch to a board made up largely of significant owners was to use that cash to start a wealth business in the US and expand abroad from there.
Kurt MacAlpine planned to prove the model in the US before taking it global
"I had a very strong point of view that I wanted to do that by launching an ultra-high-net-worth wealth management business first in the US, hopefully generating enough success to be able to globalize that business." — Kurt MacAlpine
Kurt said his predecessor, Bill Holland, and Ray Chang had run the same playbook once before. They found a small, fragmented industry that could be disrupted, Canadian mutual funds, and built scale in it through acquisitions.
