Marty Weinberg, the founder and former CEO of Assante Corp., has a new project un-der-way. He has begun building out the model he used so successfully in the late 1990s and early 2000s with Assante in his most recent venture, Pavilion Investment House Ltd. But instead of focusing solely on extending his reach throughout Canada and the U.S., he’s intent on going to every corner of the globe.

“We have signed a deal to acquire a global firm that allows us to do business in 50 countries,” Weinberg says. “We are currently interviewing and scoping out a business in South America, to be headquartered in Uruguay.”

Weinberg expects the deal with the yet unnamed financial services company to close by mid-April. “It will allow us to do more of what we’re already doing in our asset-management business,” he says, “and provide other services that give us easier access to those countries.”

Pavilion Investment House, of which Weinberg is CEO, is a Winnipeg-based holding company for Canterbury Park Capital LP, a private-equity investment firm; Harrow Partners Private Counsel Ltd. , a high net-worth investment counsellor; Pavilion International Group of Funds, an offshore fund complex that caters to non-North American institutions and investors; and Pavilion Wealth Management International, an ultra-high net-worth wealth-management shop with offices in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal, as well as new offices in London and Israel.

Harrow Partners is the heart of the organization, from an investment-management standpoint. It is the firm at which products for the Canadian and offshore markets are manufactured.

The advisors delivering the investment solutions work under the Pavilion Wealth Management umbrella. The offshore products reside in Pavilion International Funds, which is based in the Cayman Islands — to minimize withholding taxes for foreign investors.

The seed for Pavilion was planted after a number of former Assante executives and some of their key clients needed to invest their money after Assante was sold to CI Fund Management Inc. for $846 million in the summer of 2003, Weinberg says. After evaluating numerous options on both sides of the border, the executives decided the only way they would be able to get what they wanted was to build it themselves. So, they launched Harrow Partners in 2004.

Weinberg has surrounded himself with familiar faces, including Assante alumni Daniel Friedman, executive vice president of Pavilion and managing director of Canterbury Park; Denis Taillieu, Pavilion’s chief financial officer; Bruce Warnock, Pavilion’s general counsel; Dave Holt, president of Harrow Partners; Jim Morden, a co-founder of the group and executive vice president of Harrow Partners; and Anton Loukine, senior portfolio manager with Harrow Partners.

Weinberg has also recruited people from accounting giant KPMG LLP and New York-based McKinsey & Co., one of the world’s largest consulting firms, and relocated them to Winnipeg.

“I have long-term relationships with these people,” Weinberg says. “We have deep trust for each other and we work very well together.”

Weinberg says that if he wanted to experience the same kind of trajectory as he had with Assante, he had to spread his wings: “North American markets don’t have the same opportunity as they did a decade ago because of the industry’s consolidation, the pressure on fees and the speed at which things are moving. The international marketplace is where North America was a decade or more ago.”

Advisors’ books in these markets are “huge,” he adds, and a couple of advisors in London have more than $1 billion in assets under administration between them. Ex-pectations for the Canadian market aren’t as high, however.

“We’re looking for a few teams in Canada that would be in the $200-million range,” Weinberg says. “We’re recruiting right now.”

This ambitious plan, Weinberg says, is much broader than what he accomplished with Assante. He says clients in foreign marketplaces are typically family offices or multi-family offices. Markets such as London, Europe, Israel and South America were chosen because his team can provide “very sophisticated” systems, software and investment programs to which these markets don’t currently have access.

“The fees that clients are paying in those markets,” he says, “are much closer to what North American fees were a decade ago.”

The one major difference between Weinberg’s new venture and his previous one, he notes, is that Pavilion will never become a public company: “We will not be going to the capital markets.”