Christine Leong Connors spent 22 years at J.P. Morgan and then helped grow a second firm to more than $5 billion before it was sold. Her third is a team of 11 that opened with no client book at all.
An adviser who leaves a big firm almost always takes clients on day one and sorts out the technology afterward. Connors and her co-founder built the firm first and invited the clients in second.
"I mean, we actually kept joking that we had last mover advantage."
She ran Northern California for J.P. Morgan's private bank, then was president and partner of EPIQ Capital Group through its sale to IEQ Capital, so she has built inside a global bank, inside a startup, and now from nothing.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 52 minutes of audio, 21 minutes of reading.
Here are the 13 lessons that matter.
👤 Guest: Christine Leong Connors, Co-Founder and CEO of Verita Strategic Wealth Partners, previously President and Partner of EPIQ Capital Group and a 22-year J.P. Morgan private banker
🎙️ Host: Samir Kaji, CEO and Co-Founder of Allocate, who also hosts the Venture Unlocked podcast
📰 Published: 14 September 2026 on The Private Markets Playbook
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 52 min | ✅ Time saved: 31 min
Key Takeaways
Wealth management's core failure is not returns, it is that nobody can see what a client owns
Connors said even the wealthiest clients still track their own balance sheet in a personal spreadsheet
Starting with no clients is what bought the firm a clean technology stack
Four months went into picking software partners before a single client was onboarded
The industry's standard answer to more client demand is to hire more people, and that breaks the economics
A firm of 11 replaced technology partners inside its first year without clients noticing
Private equity money changes what an advisory firm optimizes for, because assets under management is the revenue line
Her image for a firm that bought advisers instead of building one is "a shopping mall of store owners"
Alternatives are about 4% of capital in the independent advisory channel, and the block is education, not access
Sizing, not selection, is the critical decision in a private-markets allocation
Too-small checks across too many funds is "death by a thousand cuts"
Big-name managers and emerging managers are not a choice: "It can be an and. It doesn't have to be an or."
1. J.P. Morgan to Verita
Kaji opened by asking Connors to walk through a career that runs from J.P. Morgan to EPIQ Capital Group to founding her own firm. The three stops are the reason the rest of the conversation has any evidence behind it.
She joined J.P. Morgan in 2001 and stayed for two decades. "Covered clients kind of the whole time I've been at J.P. Morgan, which was 22 years," she said, working alongside the investment bank so that when an executive or founding team went through a transaction she advised them.
In 2012 her future co-founder Kelly Coffey, then taking over as CEO of the private bank, told her to run Northern California. Connors did not want the job — she had a two-month-old and a two-year-old — and was told she was not being asked. "And, you know, she and Mary Ardosa at one point were like, we're not really asking you. We're going to just tell you to do it."
Kaji put the starting size at "a couple billion." Connors described the growth from there: "And then we grew it to, we were probably at like maybe five. And then we grew that over the next, till 2021 when I left. And we were over about 20." It was almost all organic, she said, with no acquired teams.
She left in 2021 for EPIQ Capital Group, which had been spun out of Iconiq two years earlier: "When I moved, we had a couple billion dollars and 22 people."
The exit came four and a half years later. "We had about 68 people, over 5 billion, and then actually sold the business, which was bittersweet because we had built something pretty incredible, but it was also a great opportunity." IEQ bought it.
She then took her first real break in 25 years, which lasted until her daughters told her to go back to work — "Mom, go back to work. You're not really helpful at home, you just boss us around." Coffey was leaving City National at the same time, and they founded Verita.
2. The Big-Firm Ceiling
Kaji drew a parallel to his own career — SVB, then First Republic in 2012, then founding Allocate — and asked what actually differed day to day between the large institution and the small one.
Connors said a new business inside a big bank can feel entrepreneurial. Building the Northern California business, "I joked that we were entrepreneurs. We were a well-funded startup." Her one condition on the new office was "no mahogany. We can do pinstripe chairs, right?"
The limit arrives with scale. "And I think when you're an entrepreneur doing it at a big firm, you can have really great ideas. But unfortunately, you're also managing to the lowest common denominator, which is big. And so innovation is harder." Anything offered has to be understood consistently by an adviser in another part of the country.
EPIQ was the contrast: "It's okay to not be right, but let's try it." What she wanted was the ability to fix things she could see: "But then also, this is where advisors are stuck. How do we fix that?"
Her summary of the difference is a line she repeats to her own team: "You can build for the future you believe in versus preserving legacy." She was careful not to call the large firm wrong — "And there's nothing wrong with a larger organization, but there's reasons. There's things like the innovator's dilemma."
3. Last-Mover Advantage
Asked what she was running toward, Connors rejected the premise of the question. Verita is not a breakaway.
"So actually, we are different in that we didn't break away from anything. And we also decided that we weren't starting with clients first." She said they could afford to do that because of where they were in their careers: clients were telling them to say when they were ready, and the answer was "let us get ready."
What they were running toward was the gap between a static industry and changing client demand, at a moment when the tools were new. "And that was just the start of AI when we did this, right? Like Claude kind of barely existed. ChatGPT was kind of there."
The joke became the strategy. "I mean, we actually kept joking that we had last mover advantage. And we would kind of giggle every time we said it. But everyone we said it to, it resonated."
The advantage is the absence of anything already installed. "And then it really started coming true, was because we didn't have any tech drag, any legacy, anything that we had to solve for, no data issues."
On the size of the choice available to her, she described a single page of vendors: "I mean, I have this one page that has hundreds of thousands of fintech firms solving for our industry. And we got to pick and choose and not have to plug it into something that existed."
Kaji's own numbers on industry growth: "So if you look at the number of advisor firms, it's grown about 2% to 3% CAGR per year. The number of advisors has grown about 6%." With growth like that, he said, you would expect more change in how the end client is served than has actually happened.
4. The Spreadsheet Problem
Kaji asked what she had seen at J.P. Morgan and EPIQ about changing client demands. Connors gave two findings, and the first is the one the firm is built around.
"One, everyone we talk to, even the wealthiest, wealthiest billionaires still manage their money with a spreadsheet, their own spreadsheet. Nothing is pulled together comprehensively for them."
The second is that performance is the entry ticket, not the product. "The second one is that clients' table stakes are investing. You have to be good at investing. But none of us would be here. No one would be breaking away. No one would be doing what we're doing if you weren't a good investor."
What clients want beyond that, she said, maps onto Sahil Bloom's book: "I don't know if you've read that Five Types of Wealth book by Sahil. They want it, right? They want community. They want time back. We call it the hassle factor. They want clarity, health. They want purpose around their wealth."
The chain runs in one direction: "And what we're finding, and we've found so much, is without clarity of what you own and how you own it, you can't develop a strategy." Without strategy, she said, the legacy piece gets complicated and the service turns cookie-cutter.
Kaji added the structural reason nobody fixes it: "And our industry, the way fees are set up, are kind of set up just to focus on investments and really just focus on the investment piece that you're managing."
Connors was specific that seeing everything is not the same as clarity. "Clarity isn't just seeing everything in one place. It's feeling like you have a great strategy around what you're doing."
The hassle factor came with an example from her own client conversations: "I'm doing a mortgage with X and they can't even pre-fill everything for me. And I don't have four hours to sit down and pull all this together."
5. Buying the Tech Stack
Kaji noted that the number of advisers grows faster than the number of firms, which means the industry's answer to demand is headcount. He asked how Verita built its stack instead.
Connors named the trap directly: "I think where we get offsides in our industry is we throw people at the problem as a solution." People are not the wrong instinct — "Our clients are human. They need people" — but reaching for them first is.
The alternative, in her words: "if you take the time to actually think about how you can think about the tech stack, think about where you're using technology, think about where you're using firms like yourself, you can actually free up the team to get more human and build more relationships with clients without having to add more people."
The firm's framing of what it is doing: "So we like to say that our tagline is we're the firm that leveraged AI and technology to get more human and to be more real with our clients."
The problem being solved is fragmentation. "Everything is going to live everywhere. Privates live in one system. Publics live in another system. Reporting live somewhere. CRM is somewhere else." An unexpected client call means "You're like spending about five minutes logging into every system."
Two things are ruled out permanently. "Like we'll never have anything ever touch a client without a human involved. We will never have any money moved or any investments done without humans." Pre-filling subscription documents, triaging the daily private-investment email, account opening and meeting prep are all fair game.
The build was a procurement exercise, not an engineering one: "So for us, it was, you know, we spent about four months evaluating all the tech partners that existed, figuring out what our tech stack looked like, figuring out what we would want to build on top of that ourselves with a couple people we brought on."
Reversibility is part of the design. "And then we are also okay iterating. We're also okay saying that didn't work. Let's flip to this." On contracts: "No, we don't. We don't sign long term." Instead the firm takes design-partner roles — "But we want the ability to pivot, if not, for sure."
Her sequencing image: "Then, you know, you build the house and then invite the guests in." A breakaway carrying a large client book cannot do that, because "the tech becomes an afterthought" and, as Kaji put it, "And then once you're in it, it's hard to switch. It's really hard."
6. What 11 People Get Done
Kaji asked her to quantify the benefit — how much more time with clients, and how different the experience is against the pre-AI version.
"We're a team of 11, and we're able to get so much more done because not only are we solving for and helping our clients, we're able to be proactive." The gain she named first is not client hours but thinking time: "We can get so much more done in a day with advising our clients, but we also have the time to think about the strategy."
The proof point is a swap nobody noticed: "We have replaced technology partners already a year in, and we've had the time to do that thoughtfully for our clients, and our clients haven't felt a thing."
She said the firm is deliberately slower than its peers: "They want to bring in as much AUM as they can, as fast as they can." Verita's stated pillars are "strategy, clarity, and legacy," and legacy includes the firm's own.
The thing she is trying not to become is a firm that wakes up in a decade to find its data everywhere, its stack "too hard to switch," and its only remaining move to "get some synergies."
7. People on Top, Agents Below
Kaji asked what will exist in wealth management in three years that does not exist now.
"An orchestration layer that pulls together everything," she said, and then described the org chart it implies: "Our team will be a lot of people sitting at the top and then the bottom of the triangle, a lot of agents."
She framed it as a promotion for operations staff rather than a threat: "It's giving the people that have sat in ops before a bigger, better opportunity to do more."
The constraint she thinks matters most is not capability. "Having said that, I think the biggest piece of where the industry needs to go is on the security side of it, right? You can't just plug something in." The firms selling into wealth management are first- and second-year companies, and the data is "client sensitive, personal, highly secure information."
Kaji named the same risk as a commercial one: "Durability of these companies, are you going to implement something that goes away?"
8. The Custodians Lag
Asked for the biggest surprise of the first year and a half, Connors did not name anything inside her own firm.
"How antiquated some of these firms that are necessary partners still are and how slow they are to innovate." The problem, she said, is that they are necessary.
The day's news was an example: "I don't know if you saw Altruist, which got acquired. I saw that today and I'm very excited because it's great that Vanguard is now going to be a player because they need to. They need to innovate. Goldman's trying something, but it's not the perfect solve across any of it."
Her diagnosis is that scale removes the pressure. "It's just how the technology as they get bigger, just they don't have to change, right? They don't have to innovate." The client is the end user, she noted, but not the customer of those platforms.
She said she would go after the problem herself under different circumstances: "If I was like 30 years younger with the same amount of experience, maybe I'd tackle that."
On what forces the change: "I think that you're seeing a ton more consolidation happening. But I also think with consolidation comes more breakaways." A platform built for breakaways to plug into "will change the industry. But here's to hoping."
9. What PE Money Changes
Kaji observed that the large aggregators are almost all financed — "You look at the big mega firms, you know, $30, $40, $50 billion, almost always have private equity influence" — and asked what that does to the end client.
Connors would not generalize. "So not all PE money is the same. There's definitely great partners out there that we met along our journey. We just didn't want it at the time and weren't ready."
Her longer-term view is that a firm can make itself not need the capital, by making the adviser experience good enough that growth does not have to be bought. Advisers, she said, are in it because "they love working with clients." Her description of what a large firm does to that: "And sometimes you go to these firms and it is so much bureaucracy and a lot of internal technology and systems and sales focused. That the nature of the role changes."
Kaji laid out the mechanics: a private equity owner is "looking for another turn," for margins and profitability, "And what pays the bills are AUM."
Connors followed that to its conclusion. "So you put money to work as fast as you can. And I think there's less focus then on whole balance sheet." And: "And I think sometimes that creates perverse incentives."
The second effect is cultural. Acquiring firms means "there could be massive cultural differences," and at the extreme, "And you wake up one day and you have a shopping mall. You have a shopping mall of store owners that all sit and sometimes they talk to each other, sometimes they don't. And they hang their hat on the name of the firm. But your experience as a client is completely dependent on who your advisor is."
10. Three Core Beliefs
Culture came up as the counterweight, and Connors treated it as an operating system rather than a poster.
"Well, culture for us is big. And I think it's really what drives the client experience too, right? If your advisors and your team's happy, the clients are happy and they feel it."
Before founding the firm she and Coffey did the work on paper. "When Kelly and I set out to build, not only did we look at the technology, we spent a long time, we joke, we did our little partner, Pre-Cana, before we formed the firm." They wrote vision documents and settled what they actually believed.
The first belief is "We are building this better" — the instruction being to take something the firm already does, go back to first principles, and redo it.
The second has an ownership structure behind it: "The second core for us is everyone on the team matters. So Kelly and I, our team, everyone's an equity partner."
The third is "we only partner with those who inspire us," applied to team members, outside partners and clients alike, with "No minimums, no tests there."
Operationally it shows up weekly: "We go through every client every Monday morning together as a team."
Kaji offered his own version — "I always tell the team, when faced with this decision, you always factor principles before growth. Great principles will create more growth in the long term, in the medium term, and usually the short term." He then asked what firms get wrong. Connors' answer: "I think sometimes growth gets in the way of culture." Hiring against a client-count target "sometimes drives growth more than it does culture," and the fix is deliberate: "So we have core agreements as a team." Kaji's closing line on it was the venture adage that "the company you build is the people you have."
11. Why Alts Stall at 4%
Kaji set up the investment half of the conversation with a number. "So if you look at the amount of capital that's in alternatives, just more broadly within the independent space is about 4%," he said, and asked why adoption has been so slow.
Connors blamed presentation before access. "I think the industry naturally has a tendency to overcomplicate, use big words, make it seem like it's kind of this esoteric, very complicated thing to solve for clients." Clients then shy away because it is overwhelming.
She is not against active management — she spent much of her career at what she called "an amazing active manager" — but "It just depends on where it sits in the portfolio," and the bar is high: "I think you really have to be super diligent about accessing the top, top, top tier managers across active, especially in the private space."
Many of her clients have their own access. Her caution to them: "Although we kind of always say just because you can write the check doesn't mean it's the best investment."
The failure she has watched happen is illiquidity that was never sized properly — "I've seen it where clients get off sides and the illiquidity becomes so much because we haven't seen a lot of liquidity for a while. Hopefully that's changing speed with some of these IPOs."
Kaji named adviser education as the real bottleneck, with wide dispersion inside a single firm because advisers who do not understand the asset class will not raise it. Connors credited her old employer here: "And I will say, JPMorgan, as big as they are, did that very well in terms of educating the advisor force."
Verita's answer is to make the idea the unit, not the deal: "And for us, it's not about the specific investment each time. It is the theme within the portfolio." An investment committee sits the whole team down with the offering and the education around it, and nothing goes out until everyone can explain it.
The house line on selling: "We kind of say, no one's pitching anything." It is part of the story being built for the client because it fits the portfolio.
12. Sizing a Private Book
Kaji drew the distinction he uses — democratization gave people access 15 years ago, but "responsible participation" has two axes: is the opportunity good enough to justify the illiquidity, and is it right for this portfolio? He asked for the rubric.
Connors' order of questions: "Well, I mean, we're always sitting there and thinking about, first, does it make sense in the portfolio? Second is liquidity and time frame." Then existing private exposure, then sector — early seed, defense, tech, AI, private credit, real estate — and what is missing.
"And then capital pacing is huge, right? Because ultimately, if you're doing this right, they're self-funding." Where a client sits in their own private-markets cycle — brand new, or 10 to 15 to 20 years in — changes the pacing.
The decision she ranks first is how much: "And then sizing is the most critical piece, right? But you also can death by a thousand cuts yourself if your balance sheet is of a certain size and you're doing really small checks."
On manager selection: "And not everyone that comes to you gets invited to the dance, right? Because you have to be super discerning. It's just that layer. There's tons out there."
Client situations differ enough that the same allocation advice does not travel. "We have one client that just has 200 private positions. There are still holes there," against another who has just had a large liquidity event and has to be paced into the market.
Connors described a broader construction: a reserve bucket, a risk-seeking bucket and a diversifying bucket, with the reserve being the one clients most need help sizing: "What is that, we used to call it the sleep at night, but what is my reserve for the long term that I need?" That runs alongside a family-office service she described as a third option between insourcing and outsourcing: "We coined the phrase, not a new phrase, but co-sourcing your family office."
13. Diligence and Access
Asked what most advisers get wrong about offering privates, Connors answered in two words.
"Diligence and access." Firms also try to do it themselves when they do not have to.
She holds both ends of the manager spectrum. "But I also love some of the emerging managers. And I don't know if a lot of firms have both." Her framing: "I think it can be an and. It doesn't have to be an or."
Kaji put the dispersion problem to her: a big manager gives a constrained band of outcomes, with an emerging manager "it's possible you can get a 5X or a 10X on a fund, but you also could have an impairment on the portfolios." Advisers, he said, buy the safe name so that no quarterly review turns into a conversation about "that one line item that's negative 6% IRR." How do you get comfortable with that?
Connors' whole answer was "We don't." Different firms have different philosophies, she said, and some take the safe route "because maybe their knowledge isn't."
Her alternative is partnering out rather than building in: "I think that, you know, Kelly and I are big believers in partnering with experts too, right?" Unless a firm is the size of a J.P. Morgan, tax and stock selection are someone else's job.
The point she ends on is that a manager can be good and still wrong for a client, because the hurdle is the client's own portfolio: "So I have a much higher bar than, you know, maybe an institution that is just looking for diversification. It's okay with 300 to 500 basis points."
Bonus Insights
Verita is already using a model-context-protocol connection to its own data, and the questions she asks it are portfolio-wide: "So we use, for example, an MCP. So at any given time for my portfolio, I know exactly what's going on." Her worked example was look-through exposure to a single private company — "How many different funds do I have SpaceX exposure? What is my look through exposure? And then ultimately, if I do sell it, what is the tax impact? Should I look at a tax harvesting structure?"
Kaji argued the industry has been structurally reactive, because "information lives everywhere. It's not real-time," and the only proactive artifact most clients get is a quarterly report. He was explicit that this is not a criticism of advisers: "This is true for all industries."
On the state of private-markets tooling, Kaji said the incumbent is a spreadsheet: "And prehistoric so much of the technology and that Microsoft Excel has been the most popular technology of all time to be able to track privates." He mapped the whole stack when he started Allocate in 2021, and "Especially me growing up in Silicon Valley and being around tech for 28 years, I couldn't imagine" what he found — "And it's still very, very bad and disjointed."
Kaji also stated a limit on his own product's market: "First of all, my view is not everybody should be in privates."
The interview was recorded in Allocate's own new studio, which Connors opened by calling "a beautiful room" and closed by noting she was "first one in this great room."
Asked what her present self knows that her younger self did not, Connors said the answer is scope, not skill: "And keeping it simple, not overcomplicating it, I think is something that, you know, the younger self of me would have understood a lot better." She had underestimated how much clients wanted "more than just investments" while working inside firms where everything was investment-led. Her second answer was about the shape of a career: "My younger self was like so eager to go on this path that I thought was a straight line."
Connors' bottom line is that the binding constraint in wealth management is not investment skill but information: until a client can see everything they own in one place, no strategy can be built on top of it, and the firms best placed to fix that are the ones with no legacy technology to protect.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Verita Strategic Wealth Partners (The firm Connors co-founded with Kelly Coffey, a team of 11 built around three pillars she names as strategy, clarity and legacy)
J.P. Morgan Private Bank (Where she spent 22 years and ran the Northern California business; she also credits it with educating its adviser force on private markets better than most)
EPIQ Capital Group and IEQ Capital (The multi-family office she joined as president and partner at 22 people, and the acquirer it was sold to)
Allocate (Kaji's private-markets platform for wealth advisers, which hosts this podcast; he started it in 2021 after mapping the software advisers were using for privates)
Altruist and Vanguard (The custody platform Connors said had just been acquired, and the acquirer she said she is "very excited" to see become a player in a segment she calls antiquated)
Goldman Sachs (Also building in adviser infrastructure, in her view — "Goldman's trying something, but it's not the perfect solve across any of it")
City National Bank (Where co-founder Kelly Coffey was CEO before the two of them founded Verita)
Claude and ChatGPT (Her marker for how early they were: when Verita was being designed, "Claude kind of barely existed. ChatGPT was kind of there")
Model Context Protocol (The connection Verita uses to query its own client data, including look-through exposure to a single company across funds)
SpaceX (Her example of a position a client may hold through several funds without knowing the total)
Microsoft Excel (Kaji's candidate for the most-used private-markets tracking technology of all time, and the thing both of them are trying to replace)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The 5 Types of Wealth – Sahil Bloom (Connors cited it as the shorthand for what clients now ask for beyond returns — community, time, clarity, health and purpose)
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