Last week, Prime Capital Financial announced the hiring of Jania Stout as president of retirement and financial wellness.

Stout started in the retirement industry about 30 years ago, working at ADP Inc. and then at Fidelity Investments before co-founding a plan advisement firm. There, she helped build a team that eventually oversaw $13 billion in retirement assets and was acquired by OneDigital in 2021.

Scott Colangelo, chairman of and manager partner in Prime Capital—and founder of its retirement division—equates hiring Stout to adding “jet fuel” to a fine-tuned machine. Stout says when she was approached about the opportunity, she saw it as a chance to both work with Colangelo and take her skills and experience to a national platform of advisers that includes 70 locations and about $30 billion in assets across workplace plans and individuals.

Stout is part of a handful of advisers changing firms after a major wave of aggregation. This year, Deana Calvelli, formerly of Creative Planning, joined NFP, an Aon company; former OneDigital advisers Joe DeBello and Katie Colon moved to CAPTRUST; and Jim Marx of Edelman Financial Engines moved to Alera Group’s growing retirement practice.

PLANADVISER spoke with Stout about her move and vision for this next stage of her career.

Jania Stout

PLANADVISER: Can you talk about how you first met Scott Colangelo?

JANIA STOUT: We were on a panel together at an internal Fidelity conference, and he was talking about what he was doing with helping people to manage their money. At the same time, I was focused on educating the employees. It was one of those panels where I was there to speak, but I was more intrigued listening to what he was talking about [regarding managed accounts] than what I was being asked about. At that time, he was doing things that nobody else was doing.

Fast forward 15-plus years, and managed accounts is a big topic in the plan advisory space. There are firms out there that are just now trying to get their arms around it, whereas I can join Scott, mix my ideas with his, and the sky’s the limit.

PLANADVISER: Why did you decide to leave your team, which you’ve had a lot of success with, for this role?

STOUT: I would say it’s more about where I’m going versus where I’m leaving. … I felt that I had a lot more I could give on a national platform. Prime Capital believed in me and believed in my thought leadership, and I saw the biggest opportunity to make that change.

I know it’s a big change—I left my team, my family … I consider them my family. I hired every one of them, hand-picked them. But they’re all very supportive. My clients are also very supportive and very excited for me, because they know what I have inside of me. I’m just so honored that Scott and Glenn [Spencer, CEO] at Prime Capital believed in me so much that they brought me over to lead the organization on the retirement and wellness side.

PLANADVISER: How has your time working at recordkeepers, then as an adviser, then running a team led to this role?

STOUT: I consider myself really lucky, because I’ve seen so many angles of this business. Being on the recordkeeping side has always been something that I think has helped me. It helped me understand what happens behind the scenes, and that knowledge led me to becoming a plan adviser. I felt like I could do more good in an independent role versus representing a platform.

When I think about, why now? Why leave such a successful team and clients that I adore? I think I can still make a bigger impact if I can influence and inspire a broader group of advisers. Coming over to Prime Capital in this leadership role, now I can help inspire hundreds of advisers and take all that knowledge that I have and that skill set and help lift them up and inspire them. … I like the idea of being “jet fuel,” as Scott said. It’s already a great organization, and I’m just going to come in and bring my energy and passion to help inspire people to do more good work.

PLANADVISER: What are key areas you’ll be focused on in retirement?

STOUT: Now that our industry has started to focus on managed accounts as well as retirement income—the decumulation side of things—we’re now really focused on doing better for the employees. I think that we’ve just scratched the surface of things as an industry. There’s so much more we can do.

I have, probably, done thousands of one-on-one financial coaching sessions over my years. I like interacting with employees and hearing what stresses them out, what’s making them nervous or worried. I think that just sticking everybody in a managed account and thinking that’s enough would be doing a disservice to them. We’ve got to keep pushing forward. There’s more that we can do to help the employees understand where they are. We’ve got to figure out a way to engage the participant and those employees that don’t raise their hand and say they need help. But we know they do need help, and because of that, I think that we’re going to get into areas that have never been explored before.