Consolidation in the RIA market has now prolonged to the industry’s dealmakers on their own.
RIA-concentrated investment decision bank Park Sutton Advisors is providing by itself to Waller Helms Advisors (WHA), a fellow investment decision lender primarily based in Chicago that specializes in insurance coverage brokerage, health care and fiscal technological innovation transactions.
Certain financial phrases of the transaction, which is getting funded with a combination of hard cash and fairness, were being not disclosed, although Park Sutton Advisors claimed that running director Steven Levitt and administrators Dan Erichson and John Eubanks will develop into companions at WHA. The transaction is predicted to shut in the third quarter of 2022 as soon as it receives acceptance from Finra.
‘While I seriously love what I’m doing and approach to do this for lots of several years to come, I thought it just could make feeling getting to be element of some thing bigger, a little something a bit more diversified,’ mentioned Levitt (pictured), who is 53 several years aged.
New York Metropolis-dependent Park Sutton Advisors has developed from 5 staff members to 18 more than the previous five a long time. The expense financial institution efficiently shepherded 25 wealth administration transactions in 2021.
WHA’s complete employee headcount will swell to 50 men and women by the deal. Park Sutton will keep its manufacturer identity for the time getting, Levitt claimed.
‘The addition of Park Sutton noticeably improves our capabilities in the wealth and investment administration sector and generates a expert firm with 11 running administrators who effectively recommended on above 50 transactions in 2021,’ WHA main executive James Anderson claimed in a statement.
Levitt told Citywire that he experienced developed exhausted of some of the far more prosaic tasks that come with working a small business, such as compliance and cybersecurity.
‘Hopefully this presents the senior bankers of Park Sutton, notably me, extra leverage,’ Levitt reported.
The deal in between Park Sutton Advisors and WHA is arguably the most noteworthy a single to touch the RIA M&A advisory place since Liz Nesvold’s Silver Lane Advisors bought alone to Raymond James in 2019. The offer created Raymond James a person of the RIA industry’s most prolific investment decision banks.
Could much more RIA M&A retailers abide by in Park Sutton’s and Silver Lane’s footsteps?
‘Yeah, in all probability,’ Levitt explained. ‘I think we deal with some of the exact troubles as RIAs, which is that you need to have scale. As you get larger, if you actually want to optimize the option in the area, you require to make investments, and there’s just a great deal of things that takes you away from being ready to provide consumers.’
McDermott, Will & Emery served as WHA’s legal counsel. Griffin Economical served as Park Sutton Advisors’s economical advisor, even though Godfrey & Kahn served as its authorized counsel.