Buckingham buys Dallas RIA with help from Focus Financial

St. Louis-based Buckingham Asset Management has agreed to buy JWA Financial Group, a Dallas-based registered investment management firm that oversees just under $400 million in assets, for an undisclosed sum. The deal gives Buckingham a fourth location to go along with St. Louis, San Francisco and Silicon Valley and brings its total assets under management or administration to $4.9 billion. While Buckingham is nominally the buyer of the firm, Focus Financial Partners LLC, a partnership of advisory firms, was behind the deal. In fact, Michael Paley, a managing director at Focus, has been trying to convince JWA to join the firm for the last five years. “He was pleasantly persistent,” said Jim Whiddon, founder and chief executive of JWA, who last year finally agreed to a deal six months after meeting Adam Birenbaum, chief executive of Buckingham. “We've had some success on our own, but it became apparent that there would be a lot of advantages if we joined forces with Buckingham.” Chief among those advantages is scale. For firms it acquires, Buckingham handles front and back office services, and practice management support. It also provides a turnkey asset management program for a group of 130 independent advisory firms called the BAM Alliance, which collectively manage more than $13.4 billion in assets. “We're excited about the opportunities in the Dallas/Fort Worth market,” Mr. Birenbaum said, adding that the firm looks for partners who share the same investment values — namely evidence-based or passive management, and a belief in holistic wealth management. JWA is the sixth firm that Buckingham has absorbed in less than three years, adding $1.5 billion in new client assets through the transactions. Focus has been financing Buckingham's expansion since it bought the firm in 2007. “We couldn't do these deals without Focus behind us,” said Mr. Birenbaum.