Our Story
Founded for the right reason
In 1995, Integris founder, Gifford Lehman, had been working as an institutional investment professional in New York since 1977. Giff and his wife Pam were going through their annual process of reviewing their finances, and consulting with their “team” of advisors – attorney, insurance agent, and tax accountant – to reconcile and integrate their financial life.
Giff found the process frustrating because his team was not really a team. Each advisor was an expert in his or her field, but no one was coordinating the process. Even for Giff, a seasoned investment professional, creating coherency from the input of all these individual experts was a struggle.
So, Giff and Pam sat down and outlined what they needed to give them confidence in their financial affairs. They needed:
- Objective advice;
- that integrated all aspects of their financial life into a coherent whole;
- from someone who could explain the issues clearly;
- and who would take into consideration not only their money, but who they were and what was important to them and their family.
And thus Integris was born in 1997, with the guiding principal being the thoughtful and comprehensive integration of our clients’ financial lives with their goals and values – the kind of firm we would want to hire for ourselves.
