An All-American Finance Empire Drew Billions—and a Regulator’s Attention

Jim Bowen has a salesman’s knack for making a dusty old spiel sound splendid. His hands dance, his eyebrows jump, and his voice, a cigar aficionado’s moneyed growl, revs up a gear. The chief executive officer of a quiet but lucrative firm called First Trust, Bowen gets especially worked up by his favorite topic: the nobility of the financial advisers who shepherd America’s savings.

“They live lives of service, they spend their entire life tending what I have kind of come to call the wealth of others,” he said in a 2023 video podcast, the emphasized word popping out like a big dog’s bark. “We serve them because they serve the real client.”