Tom Butch is out at Overland Park, Kansas-based Ivy Investments [profile], and a 19-year company veteran is taking his place.

This morning Phil Sanders, CEO and chief investment officer of Ivy parent Waddell & Reed Financial, confirms that Butch has stepped down from the Waddell family of companies. At Ivy, Butch passes the Ivy Distributors, Inc presidency to IDI's head of global relationships, Nikki Newton, effective immediately.

Butch also served as executive vice president and chief marketing officer of all of Waddell & Reed, and as president of its broker-dealer subsidiary, Waddell & Reed, Inc. Also effective immediately, Shawn Mihal, chief operating officer of WRI, is taking over for Butch atop the B-D. There is no official word yet on how Butch's CMO duties at Waddell will be handled.

"On behalf of our Board and the leadership team, I thank Tom for his dedicated service to the company over the last 18 years and wish him much success in the future," Sanders states.

Meanwhile, Sanders is making some other leadership changes, too. He promoted chief financial officer Brent Bloss to chief operating officer. Bloss will keep the CFO hat for now, then pass it to chief accounting officer Ben Clouse next year.

All these changes a year and a half after two huge changes at Waddell. In April 2016 the publicly traded company rebranded Ivy Funds as Ivy Investments, complete with an updated logo. Then in May 2016 Waddell revealed that, effective in August 2016, longtime CEO Hank Hermann was passing the reins to Sanders.

Newton, an alumnus of both the University of Central Arkansas and the Washington University Olin School of Business, first joined the Waddell family in 1998. He has served in a variety of roles.

Butch, an alumnus of Penn State, first joined the Waddell family in 1999 after leading the mutual fund division at Stein Roe & Farnham (now part of Columbia Threadneedle) and working at Mellon. It was Butch, almost 15 years ago, who guided Waddell into third-party distribution of its mutual funds, outside of its own broker-dealer's advisor force. 

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