Consolidation in the RIA market has now extended to the industry’s dealmakers on their own.
RIA-concentrated expenditure bank Park Sutton Advisors is advertising itself to Waller Helms Advisors (WHA), a fellow financial commitment lender based in Chicago that specializes in insurance coverage brokerage, healthcare and financial engineering transactions.
Particular money terms of the transaction, which is currently being funded with a mixture of dollars and equity, were being not disclosed, however Park Sutton Advisors claimed that managing director Steven Levitt and administrators Dan Erichson and John Eubanks will come to be associates at WHA. The transaction is anticipated to close in the 3rd quarter of 2022 once it gets approval from Finra.
‘While I actually take pleasure in what I’m accomplishing and prepare to do this for a lot of several years to come, I thought it just could make feeling getting element of anything even bigger, a little something a little bit a lot more diversified,’ mentioned Levitt (pictured), who is 53 several years outdated.
New York Town-dependent Park Sutton Advisors has developed from five staff to 18 in excess of the past 5 years. The expense bank successfully shepherded 25 prosperity administration transactions in 2021.
WHA’s complete employee headcount will swell to 50 individuals by way of the offer. Park Sutton will retain its brand name id for the time becoming, Levitt mentioned.
‘The addition of Park Sutton drastically enhances our abilities in the prosperity and expense management sector and creates a expert firm with 11 controlling directors who properly suggested on about 50 transactions in 2021,’ WHA chief executive James Anderson reported in a statement.
Levitt advised Citywire that he experienced developed tired of some of the more prosaic responsibilities that appear with managing a business, these as compliance and cybersecurity.
‘Hopefully this provides the senior bankers of Park Sutton, significantly me, extra leverage,’ Levitt explained.
The offer in between Park Sutton Advisors and WHA is arguably the most noteworthy just one to touch the RIA M&A advisory house since Liz Nesvold’s Silver Lane Advisors offered alone to Raymond James in 2019. The offer designed Raymond James 1 of the RIA industry’s most prolific investment banking companies.
Could additional RIA M&A shops follow in Park Sutton’s and Silver Lane’s footsteps?
‘Yeah, likely,’ Levitt claimed. ‘I believe we experience some of the same challenges as RIAs, which is that you will need scale. As you get more substantial, if you genuinely want to optimize the option in the space, you will need to make investments, and there’s just a good deal of stuff that requires you away from currently being able to serve customers.’
McDermott, Will & Emery served as WHA’s legal counsel. Griffin Fiscal served as Park Sutton Advisors’s financial advisor, though Godfrey & Kahn served as its legal counsel.
