Founder and CEO
Savant
Brent is the founder and CEO of Savant and works in the Rockford, IL headquarters.
Brent is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional, and a Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA®). He has been involved in the financial services industry since 1988 and previously taught investment and finance courses at Rock Valley College, Rockford University, and Northern Illinois University.
Brent is a co-founder and past president of Zero Alpha Group (ZAG), an industry association. He is also a co-founder of the Alliance for RIAs (aRIA), a prestigious industry group. Brent was a long-term participant in Vistage (previously known as TEC) and The Strategic Coach™. He is currently a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) and serves on the boards of the NIU Foundation and the RVC Foundation.
Brent was named by Chicago magazine as the #1 independent financial advisor for the Chicagoland area in 2008 and one of the nation’s top professional advisors by J.K. Lasser. In 2017 he was ranked by Forbes as #40 on their top 250 wealth advisors list. From 1997 until the survey ended in 2008, Brent appeared on Robb Report Worth magazine’s “The Nation’s 100 Most Exclusive Wealth Advisors” list. In 2011, Brent was named the nation’s 10 the “Most Experienced Independent Financial Advisor” by Bloomberg Businessweek. Brent was named “one of the 17 people advisors should watch in 2017” by Financial Planning magazine. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events and is recurrently featured in local, industry, and national media. Brent was named to Barron’s Advisor Hall of Fame in 2019, an award presented to one percent of all advisors in the industry, and has appeared in at least 10 of Barron’s annual Top 100 Advisor rankings. Under Brent’s leadership, Savant was named to the Inc. 5000 annual list of fastest-growing private companies in America in 2023. In 2024, Brent was named to the Chicago Titan 100, which recognizes the Chicago area’s most accomplished business leaders, and was named CEO of the Year by WealthManagement.com for individual RIA firms with $20+ billion in assets under management.
AI will not simply change how work gets done inside wealth management firms, it will reshape who does the work, which skills matter most and how firms build teams for growth. In this forward-looking closing keynote, wealth management leaders will explore how AI is likely to affect staffing models across advisory, operations, marketing, compliance and client service. The conversation will examine which responsibilities may be automated or augmented, where new roles and capabilities will emerge, and why human judgment, relationship-building and strategic thinking will become even more valuable. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of how to prepare their people and organizations for what comes next, including how to rethink hiring, develop existing talent and design a firm that uses AI to increase capacity without sacrificing the client experience.