After completing a three-month sabbatical, Joe Canavan, chairman and CEO of Assante Wealth Management (Canada) Ltd., has announced he will be stepping down from his position on Nov. 11.
Steven Donald, Assante\u2019s president and chief operating officer, will take over Canavan\u2019s position at the Toronto-based full-service dealer.
\u201cThere was an awful lot to do when I got here, but today… most of the big ideas have been put in place,\u201d Canavan says. \u201cI feel now is the time for Assante to have new leadership and fresh thinking.\u201d
And although Donald says he will miss working with Canavan, he\u2019s \u201cexcited to take the reins of a company as solid as Assante and continue to develop the initiatives we have in place to support our advisors.\u201d
The rest of the firm\u2019s management team will remain the same. This includes Bob Dorrell as senior vice president of distribution services, who will lead advisor services and business development; and Jaime Ross as senior vice president of wealth and estate planning, who will lead the private-client, wealth-planning and insurance teams.
Canavan, Donald and Ross had worked together at Toronto-based Synergy Asset Management Inc. <\/b>, which Canavan founded in 1998 and sold in 2003.
Over the past 20 years, Canavan has become known for his ability to restructure financial services companies \u2014 with impressive results.
In 1989, he joined Fidelity Investments Canada ULC<\/b> as vice president and director of national sales, helping turn $60 million in assets under management into $6 billion in four years.
In 1994, he launched GT Global (Canada) <\/b>, which gained $2.4 billion in AUM in less than 30 months under his leadership.
As president and CEO of Synergy, Canavan saw the firm\u2019s AUM grow to $1.4 billion before it was purchased by Toronto-based CI Financial Corp., <\/b> which had acquired Assante. It became apparent that CI CEO Bill Holland had bought Synergy so he could assign the task of rebuilding Assante to Canavan.
\u201cWhen we sold Synergy to CI, we knew there were bigger opportunities coming with Assante,\u201d Canavan says. \u201cIt was going to be a huge challenge involving a huge amount of work.\u201d
Canavan says that rebuilding Assante became a bigger challenge than he had anticipated. But he believes he helped make the company more professional, instilled pride in its advisors and brought an \u201cadded focus on education and holistic wealth management\u201d to the firm.
Canavan adds that the transition in Assante\u2019s executive suite is going to be a seamless one, with the business running as usual: \u201cThe only difference is Steven Donald will be running things without me.\u201d
The change in leadership shouldn\u2019t have a significant impact on Assante overall, agrees Gabriel Dechaine, a research analyst with Genuity Capital Markets<\/b> in Toronto: \u201cThe leadership that is taking over was already entrenched within the company and [has] been heavily involved in the day-to-day operation from the start. I think [Canavan\u2019s] task, which was a multi-year integration of Assante, was largely done; and the next phase is the continuing operation of the company.\u201d
Canavan says he has no immediate career plans and will start looking for opportunities after leaving Assante in November.
\u201cI felt it would be disloyal to be out there looking at [career opportunities] and thinking too hard about my next step during this time,\u201d Canavan says. \u201cI wanted to maintain full integrity all the way through until I made my decision.\u201d
During his sabbatical this past summer, Canavan was hoping Holland would announce the purchase of another financial services company. That would have given Canavan a chance to do what he does best \u2014 rebuild a recently acquired financial services firm.
\u201cI had hoped I would come back to this enormous opportunity that would require an immense amount of work,\u201d Canavan says. \u201cUnfortunately that didn\u2019t happen.\u201d
Canavan will be conducting a cross-country tour and will attend the CI board meeting on Nov. 10 before leaving.
\u201cI want to ensure that everybody knows why I made the decision I did,\u201d he says, \u201cand that there is nothing wrong with the company.\u201d\tIE<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Successor Steven Donald says he\u2019s \u201cexcited to take the reins of a company as solid as Assante\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3013,3021],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320747"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=320747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}