Dundee Corp. holds assets from mining and energy to real estate.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
David Goodman has hired back yet another ex-Dundee employee from Bank of Nova Scotia to help him rebuild the wealth-management business.
On Tuesday, Dundee Corp. announced that Adam Donsky will start in January as chief investment officer at Goodman & Company Investment Counsel Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary.
Mr. Donsky was a long-time portfolio manager with Dynamic Funds – formerly owned by Dundee Corp. At Scotiabank, he oversaw the high-net-worth client group.
Mr. Donsky is the fourth former Dundee Wealth Inc. employee to make it back to the mothership. (Dundee Corp. sold Dundee Wealth to Scotiabank in 2011).
"We are delighted to have Adam back," Mr. Goodman, chief executive officer of Dundee Corp., said in an e-mail.
Mr. Goodman himself was a former CEO of Dundee Wealth and spent a number of years at Scotia as head of global asset management before replacing his father, Ned Goodman, as chief executive officer at Dundee Corp. in mid-2014.
In March of this year, Richard McIntyre landed back at Dundee as head of wealth management after spending about three years at Scotiabank post-acquisition, including two years running its private client business.
And a few months bank, Dundee also rehired Daymon Loeb, a high-net-worth adviser, from Scotiabank.
All of these people are focused on building a new business at Dundee Corp. that will focus on managing money for high-net-worth clients. Currently, the division is tiny with about $90-million under management. Dundee is not interested in getting back into the mutual-fund business. As Mr. Goodman has made clear, he views competing against the big banks and the large independents who dominate the market as a futile exercise.
But building a business in high net worth won't be easy, either. Dundee will compete against a whole host of established companies, such as Gluskin Sheff + Associates Inc. and Burgundy Asset Management Ltd., which manage money for affluent individuals and institutions such as pension endowments.
Nevertheless, Dundee Corp. is setting a high bar for itself.
"I would certainly like to look at year one where we have one to two billion [dollars] under management," Mr. McIntyre said in an interview.
"I can certainly see at some point in the future having $10-billion under management. I think that's where I want to get to relatively quickly."
When Mr. McIntyre worked at Dundee the first time around, he managed a team of 1,200 advisers. But he will manage significantly fewer people now, as Dundee doesn't need to hire as many high-net-worth advisers as the account size per adviser should be considerably bigger.
Niall McGee