Background
Managing Director, RIA Partnerships
Jay Robinson is Managing Director of RIA Partnerships at The Well. He brings 30 years of financial services experience, more than 20 of them inside the RIA industry, and he joined The Well in August 2025.
He began his career as a financial planner at American Express Financial Advisors, the firm now known as Ameriprise, and went on to lead regional sales teams at broker-dealers. His record includes Dain Rauscher, Piper Jaffray and RBC Dain Rauscher, and two stretches at Charles Schwab: 1999 to 2003, and 2006 until late 2023, through the TD Ameritrade years inside the Schwab merger. As a Regional Manager at Schwab Advisor Services, he worked with hundreds of independent advisors and the firms they built, the same firms The Well serves today. Most recently he was VP of Partner Development at Mercer Advisors.
Over his career Jay passed the Series 7, 8, 9, 10, 24, 53 and 63 exams. He holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota Duluth and the Certified Private Wealth Advisor (CPWA) designation.
At The Well, Jay works with growth-oriented RIAs of all sizes, in his words, to secure elite talent at all levels, from client service to the C-suite. Some of those searches replace a seat. Others add one so the firm can grow. Jay is often the first person a firm leader talks to. He learns the firm, scopes the role and signs the search, then a dedicated recruiter runs it. The seats he opens run from advisors and service advisors to operations directors, chief compliance officers and COOs, for firms from Minnesota and Wisconsin to New York, California, Texas, Georgia and Virginia.
Some of that work comes through his network. In the fall of 2026, a referral from Jay's network led him to a Wisconsin RIA that needed a chief compliance officer. Nine days after he logged the first conversation, the firm had signed the search.
Jay has spent his career inside the rooms where RIA firms make decisions about growth, about team and about what they need next. He speaks the language of the firms The Well serves because he spent decades alongside them. He says The Well's values, faith and family among them, are what drew him here.
Away from work, Jay and his family stay busy outdoors: summers on the lake, hunting, fishing and hiking. One of his favorite quotes comes from Zig Ziglar: "You will get everything you want out of life if you help enough other people get what they want."