A dealmaking frenzy is reshaping the booming wealth-management business
Firms are snapping up smaller competitors in a bid to capture a piece of Americans’ growing wealth.
Mark Armbruster used to know most of the other owners of wealth-management firms in the Rochester, N.Y., area. Now, a spate of recent dealmaking has resulted in many competitors being bought by out-of-towners—including at least four in the past year alone.
At 53 years old, Armbruster isn’t feeling pressure to take advantage of the paydays his rivals are landing. He hopes his children will one day take over Armbruster Capital Management, which manages $1 billion for what he calls “the millionaire next door." Yet he still gets a steady stream of emails and calls from would-be buyers.
“It’s pretty constant," Armbruster said.
A dealmaking boom in the fragmented wealth-management business is playing out across the country. Wealth-management firms, in some cases fueled by private-equity money, are racing to capture their piece of the swelling ranks and pocketbooks of the wealthy and uber-wealthy. So they are snapping up smaller firms, creating growing national competitors along the way.
James Anderson, co-head of Houlihan Lokey’s financial-services group, estimates that deals for these firms—also known as registered investment advisers, or RIAs—are on pace this year to match or exceed the record number of about 250 deals the sector notched in 2024. “ ‘Frenzy’ is not too strong a word" for the dealmaking activity, Anderson said.
There are thousands of RIAs, which focus on financial planning and on managing investment portfolios. They have a fiduciary duty to act in their clients’ best interest and typically charge fees as a percentage of assets managed. Most sit outside the big banks, according to the trade group Investment Adviser Association.
Some of the deal boom is driven by aging owners looking for succession plans. At the same time, private-equity firms are increasingly looking to buy up wealth-management businesses, attracted by the industry’s stable clientele, recurring revenue and relatively low investment costs.
Undergirding it all is a huge tide of wealth creation since the pandemic. More people are looking for help managing their money, supercharging the industry’s growth.
Roughly one-third of the rise in real average household wealth that the top 0.1% wealthiest households in the U.S. have accumulated since 1990 has occurred since 2020, based on an analysis of Federal Reserve data through June 2025 by economist Steven Fazzari at Washington University in St. Louis. The rest of the top 1% wealthiest households also saw their inflation-adjusted wealth grow, though at a lesser rate, with 16% of their comparable wealth created since 2020.
Buyers of independent wealth-management firms say bigger is often better.
Managing more assets can mean the ability to offer clients more rarefied investment products and the sort of one-stop shop they say clients are seeking. That includes everything from tax-and-estate planning to, at the upper tiers of wealth, services such as staffing and property management. While ultrawealthy clients can be demanding, their larger accounts mean firms can focus on managing fewer relationships.
Creative Planning, a wealth-management firm based in Overland Park, Kan., has acquired roughly 20 small firms in the past two years, largely to increase its presence in local markets, said Chief Executive Peter Mallouk. Having a local presence raises awareness among potential clients, he said. “They’ve heard of the Morgans and Merrills and Goldmans. We’d like to raise our profile to be a true alternative to that locally," he said.
Mallouk expects the firm to manage and advise on more than $650 billion going into 2026, up from roughly $375 billion in December 2023—and said he believes there is significantly more runway.
Creative Planning’s valuation increased more than five times between 2020, when General Atlantic took a minority stake, and 2024, when TPG invested at a roughly $16 billion valuation, said people familiar with the firm. Its clients include more than 150 billionaire and centimillionaire families, Mallouk said, along with tens of thousands of millionaires and multimillionaires.
Another big buyer of RIAs has been Miami-based Corient, which is led by former McKinsey management consultant Kurt MacAlpine. It will soon manage and advise on more than $400 billion, MacAlpine said.
Corient is a subsidiary of CI Financial, an asset manager that recently was taken private by Mubadala Capital, an arm of Mubadala Investment, an Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth manager. Two deals Corient struck over the past year, for European firm Stanhope Capital Group and Stonehage Fleming, added more than $200 billion in assets.
Corient works with the ultrawealthy. There was a “void in ultrahigh net worth," MacAlpine said, particularly for families with members scattered across countries. “There was an opportunity for somebody to come in and be a comprehensive provider."
Part of Corient’s pitch is convenience for the superrich, assigning anywhere from six to 10 advisers to a family to help them with everything from paying bills and developing tax-and-estate plans to making arrangements for private aviation. That can save money for clients, such as musicians who fly private to rehearsals several times a week.
MacAlpine said he plans to do more deals and is in talks with several wealth managers about buying their firms. “My deal pipeline is as robust, if not more robust, than it’s ever been."
Write to Juliet Chung at Juliet.Chung@wsj.com and Gunjan Banerji at gunjan.banerji@wsj.com
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