About us

Christopher E. Vroom,
CFA, AM, CFP^®

I started Atlas Meridian Capital because I was the client who needed it.For years, I worked with major private banks and wirehouses, the firms that aresupposed to serve people with complex financial lives. What I experienced wassurprisingly unsophisticated. Allocations went unmonitored, calls wentunreturned, recommendations were plain vanilla and not tailored to me. My taxsituation was an afterthought. Alternative assets, business interests, and tangibleasset holdings existed in a completely separate universe from my investmentportfolio, a placeholder on my PFS. When I needed responsiveness, I got voicemail.When I needed coordination, I got silos.

I wasn't looking for more products. I was looking for a partner who could see the whole picture, someone who understood that an investment portfolio, a tax strategy, an estate plan, and a collection of tangible assets are not separate conversations. They are one conversation.

An investment portfolio, a tax strategy, an estate plan, and a collection of tangible assets are not separate conversations. They are one conversation.

Before founding Atlas Meridian, I spent over 25 years at the center of capital markets and institutional finance. I began my career as an equity research analyst at Alex. Brown & Sons, the oldest investment bank in the United States, before rising to Managing Director and Global Head of Internet Equity Research at Credit Suisse First Boston, where I advised on and led public offerings for companies including Starbucks, eBay, Amazon, and Home Depot. I spent two decades as a Managing Director at Roanoke Asset Management in New York, building the firm's all-cap growth product and helping lead its financial planning practice.

I gained hardwon and valuable startup experience launching Artspace, a pioneering ecommerce platform designed to create new sources of income for cultural institutions and artists while democratizing access to art. After selling Artspace, I built CollectorIQ, a valuation and risk analytics platform for art and collectible assets, used by Bank of America, Chubb, Sotheby’s, among others, and Valence Digital, a business leveraging blockchain technology to provide identity, provenance and value attribution architecture for data assets.

I knew that as a founder and business builder myself, I wanted an advisor who could relate to the decisions I was making, not just the financial mechanics, but the strategic thinking behind building and running companies. Most advisors have never built anything. That gap shows.

I also recognized something that the industry consistently overlooks. Millions of high-net-worth individuals own art, collectibles, and other tangible assets, yet very few advisors incorporate that wealth into a planning context. It sits outside the financial plan, often unvalued, underinsured, and disconnected from estate and tax strategy.

Having spent decades building at the intersection of art and finance — founding Artadia, launching Artspace.com, and creating CollectorIQ, I was uniquely positioned to close that gap. At Atlas Meridian, tangible assets are not an afterthought. They are part of the plan from day one.

There is one more piece that is core to our ethos: our commitment to give back. I founded Artadia, now a vibrant national organization that has provided millions in support to artists across the country, because I believe artists are national Treasures, people who shape how we see and understand the world. That conviction did not stop at philanthropy.

Artists and creative professionals deserve the same caliber of financial guidance as any founder or executive, especially in areas like tax strategy, retirement planning, and long-term wealth building that can feel unfamiliar within a creative career. Most advisors don't understand how artists earn. Most artists don't realize how much they may be leaving on the table. Atlas Meridian was built to bridge that gap as well.

Atlas Meridian exists because the wealth management industry fails the people who need it most: founders, creators, collectors, and business owners whose financial lives are too complex, too creative, and too interconnected for a generic advisory model, but who want the coordination of a family office without the Infrastructure.

I built the firm I wished I had. And I extended it to the communities I care most about: founders building companies, collectors building legacies, and artists building worlds.