Wilmington-based Live Oak Bank announced Tuesday that it has launched Live Oak Private Wealth.

The new entity aims to give wealthy individuals and families "the wealth and investment management strategies they need to pursue their financial goals," according to a news release from Live Oak Bancshares, parent company of Live Oak Bank.
 
Managing directors of Live Oak Private Wealth, which is a subsidiary of Live Oak Bank, are Andy Basinger, Jason Carroll, Bill Coleman and Connor Keller. This team of wealth management professionals are, the release stated, "committed to providing a personalized approach to financial strategies."
 
Basinger, formerly senior vice president of Wells Fargo Private Bank, is a Certified Financial Planning professional. He joins Live Oak with more than 16 years of experience in wealth management.
 
Carroll has been with Live Oak Bank for five years and has more than 20 years of experience in the investment advising and financial services industries. He previously served as managing director of the investment advisory lending team at Live Oak Bank.
 
Coleman and Keller bring to their new roles 32 years and 20 years, respectively, of experience in investment advising.
 
"Our professional advisers come with a great track record of performance and a sizeable client base we hope will follow them here," Live Oak Bank President Scott Custer said in an interview Tuesday.
 
To create the personal approach it touts, Live Oak Private Wealth will use technology and innovative strategies and will offer a "state-of-the-art client experience to give this generation and the next tailored solutions to support and advance their objectives," the release stated.
 
Basinger said that often, financial advising firms have systems that don't communicate with each other, so that disparate information must be pulled together by individual advisers.
 
"We will streamline the information so it's all on one page and the client experience will be much more real-time," he explained. "We believe that will be a competitive advantage."
 
Custer said that the new private wealth team at Live Oak Bank will be "happy to compete with local wealth managers. Andy and his colleagues are teeing it up as we speak."
 
Live Oak Private Wealth expects to manage $400 million in assets to start, company officials said.

Officials say the new entity is a natural outgrowth of Live Oak Bank.
 
"Live Oak Private Wealth is the perfect complement to our lending business," Custer said. "If you think about our lending, especially our SBA lending, we finance a lot of business transitions: [selling a business] from one owner to the next; from one generation to another; from partner to partner."
 
The sellers, he explained, have a large influx of capital, and may not have had time to think about how best to invest that capital. "Now you can sit down with a group of professionals at Live Oak that can step right in and give you good advice and counsel."
 
Basinger said his team hopes to initiate a financial planning process with business owners before they sell, so those owners can think in advance about what they want to accomplish with the proceeds of their sale.
 
"We will take a three-prong approach that considers the tax implications [of the money], the cash flow they need to live on, and how to pass along their assets later in a seamless fashion. We will develop an investment philosophy to support that."
 
Because of today's communications and financial technology, Basinger added, he feels confident that Live Oak Private Wealth managers will be able to develop and maintain personal relationships with clients all over the country.
 
Custer believes that the new entity already has a sizeable network from which to attract clients, in addition to clients that come to the bank from lending transactions. He calls it the Live Oak ecosystem.
 
"We've got 500-plus employees, plus all the things we're doing around the technology front, plus all our partners. That's a pretty long list. There's so much going on with opportunities here," he said.
 
Founded in 2008 with a focus on making SBA loans to specific industries, Live Oak Bank and its parent company have since diversified their services and products to include other government-backed loans and a variety of deposit products. There has been a steady increase in the number of verticals to which the company lends. One of those verticals is registered investment advisers (RIAs). Custer said he does not anticipate a conflict with that industry as Live Oak creates its own RIA.