Boutique multi-manager brings in SMA vet MacKillop

Thomas Coyle

20 April 2007

Frontier AM out to raise its profile among fee-based advisors and sponsors. Mutual-fund portfolio boutique Frontier Asset Management has hired managed-account industry pioneer Scott MacKillop in a bid to reach more fee-based advisors.

"I'm helping Frontier get its asset-management services distributed more broadly," says MacKillop, a frequent conference speaker on fee-based advisory products and services. "I'm also wearing the compliance hat."

Back a bit

Frontier manages applies returns-based style analysis to managers -- which the firm's founder and CIO Gary Miller says he developed as a practitioner in parallel to Nobel laureate William Sharpe's academic work in the same realm -- and manages portfolios of mutual funds by combining select managers in portfolios for consistent returns.

Miller says he asked MacKillop to join the firm as president to take on business development, public relations and compliance because of his extensive experience in those realms. "And because we know each other and like each other -- and when you get into your fifties I think it's important to work with people you like."

MacKillop and Miller have known each other since the mid 1990s when MacKillop was president of mutual-fund wrap provider ADAM Investment Services, now part of Portfolio Management Consultants , when Miller was its CIO.

"Scott's just a great guy to have involved in a business," says Miller. "He knows this stuff as well as anyone in the industry."

MacKillop was most recently president of Houston-based US Fiduciary's managed-account and investment-consulting service platform. Earlier he served as president of PMC, now part of Envestnet Asset Management. MacKillop also founded Trivium Consulting, a consultancy to fee-based investment-management and consulting programs.

An attorney by training, MacKillop began his career in Washington, D.C., as a specialist in corporate, ERISA, securities and venture-capital law.

MacKillop is based in Denver.

Sheridan, Wy.-based Frontier, which was established in 2000, manages about $400 million -- mainly for individual and high-net-worth investors.

Its distribution partners include independent broker-dealers Multifinancial Securities, Pacific West and the Private Consulting Group. -FWR