Captrust Financial Advisors notched its first acquisition of the year by folding in Frontier Wealth Management, a $4 billion registered investment adviser based in Kansas City, Missouri.
The deal is described as expanding Captrust’s Midwest presence by adding nearly 50 employees and offices in Kansas City, Denver, Wichita, Kansas; and Omaha, Nebraska.
Nick Blasi, one of Frontier’s founding partners who launched the RIA in 2007 and has been chief executive since 2009, said the sale to Raleigh, North Carolina-based Captrust was part of a longer-term growth and succession plan.
“We were a company growing pretty rapidly and the next three years of our strategic plan centered on building out infrastructure, tax and bill pay services, and we wanted to make sure we had solid career paths for a lot of our younger employees,” he said. “We also wanted to make sure our team members could get ownership.”
Of Frontier's assets, Blasi said approximately $3 billion qualifies as wealth management and $1 billion is in corporate retirement plans and endowments.
That compares to Captrust’s breakdown of more than $100 billion under management and $750 billion under advisement across more than 1,100 employees at 70 locations nationwide.
“Nick and his team have built an impressive business with many operational similarities to ours, which, along with strong cultural alignment, creates an excellent fit for Captrust,” said Rush Benton, Captrust’s senior director of strategic growth, in a prepared statement.
“Frontier understands and shares our method of one unified practice, and we are excited to see how they grow and thrive as we join forces,” he added.
Frontier, which will be rebranded under the Captrust banner, has participated in the M&A business, completing a dozen acquisitions including recruiting individual advisers, since 2011.
“As I started creating Frontier’s strategic plan for the next three years, I realized that we would need to invest significant time, energy and capital to build out areas of our business, like cybersecurity, marketing and investment services, to continue to grow,” Blasi said. “These are already areas where Captrust has achieved significant scale. Joining Captrust will benefit not only our clients, but the Frontier team as well. From the opportunity to become shareholders to new career paths, Captrust puts our team on a great trajectory for growth.”
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