RIA giant Mercer matches 2024 deal count, lays groundwork for Idaho expansion

Mega-RIA Mercer has expanded its Western footprint by acquiring two firms with offices across Oregon, Idaho, and Southern California. The RIAs are the 10th and 11th acquisitions of 2025 for Mercer, matching its deal total from all of last year.

Bend, Ore.-based Eagle Wealth Management joins Mercer as a 10-person team managing roughly $350 million in assets for 300 clients. Chad Staskal and his wife Cami Staskal founded Eagle Wealth in 2008. Also joining Mercer is West Oak Capital, an RIA headquartered in the Boise suburb of Eagle, Idaho. The firm also has a presence in Westlake Village, California. West Oak manages approximately $500 million in assets for over 100 family clients.

“We did 11 [acquisitions] in 2024 so we are already ahead of [last year] by multiple metrics, not just deal volume but deal size as well,” Martine Lellis, principal, M&A partner development at Mercer, told InvestmentNews. “I am seeing more larger firms come to market, and I do think the valuations are making it incredibly attractive for people that either need a succession strategy or want to enhance the services for their clients.”

Lellis says Eagle Wealth Management follows two smaller Bend-based firms to join Mercer last year amid its push across the Pacific Northwest that includes its existing office in Portland, Ore. “We think there's a great opportunity in that market in terms of the Pacific Northwest,” Lellis said. "Idaho is a rapidly growing area as a lot of wealth is moving there. This [West Oak Capital] will help establish something that we think we can grow from.”

Denver-headquartered Mercer manages roughly $81 billion in client assets as one of the nation’s largest RIA aggregators, having bought over 100 firms since its M&A strategy launched in 2016. Mercer's biggest deal so far this year was its June acquisition of Full Sail Capital, an Oklahoma City-based RIA managing approximately $2 billion in assets. 

“The last three acquisitions that we did were Boston, Massachusetts, Naples, Florida, and Oklahoma City — all markets where we really didn't have a huge presence, if any. And those were billion-dollar plus firms, so that's enough infrastructure there to really make an impact,” Lellis said. 

Part of Mercer’s appeal to advisors is its pitch of equity ownership in the company. Among Mercer’s 1,300 employees, about half (674) are ownership shareholders in the firm, which is led by CEO Dave Welling. The majority of Mercer is owned by private equity firms Atlas Partners, Genstar Capital and Oak Hill Capital, as well as Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC.

M&A activity for RIAs has hit record highs in 2025 with Fidelity tracking its fastest year yet to 100 transactions. Despite the abundance of M&A, “there's more RIA firms being created every year than are being purchased,” said Lellis, who does not foresee this month’s expected interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve having a potential negative impact on RIA dealmaking.

“Anytime an interest rate environment lowers, then you're going to commensurately see more opportunities for capital, which means more possible entrants to the market that want to participate. So I don't see it as a bad thing,” she said.