EP Wealth Begins 2025 with $500M Nashville Acquisition


EP Wealth Advisors, which grew to $31 billion in property underneath administration final 12 months, has kicked off 2025 by closing its first acquisition in Tennessee with $500 million registered funding advisor Criterion Capital Advisors.

Criterion Capital co-founder Allan Horner leads the five-person workforce on the impartial, Nashville-based RIA, which incorporates companions Mark Pierce and Scott Freeman. The agency, based in 2005, provides monetary planning, investing and tax planning.

Ryan Parker, CEO of EP Wealth, mentioned the RIA match with the agency’s technique to usher in fee-only advisors fascinated by continued natural development by shut work with current and new shoppers.

“The three major companions and advisors got here out to Salt Lake Metropolis, and we instantly noticed a enterprise match, a philosophy match and a cultural match round find out how to serve shoppers,” Parker mentioned, referring to town the place he’s primarily based. “Additionally they needed to do what plenty of our companions need to do, which is preserve an area, boutique really feel for his or her shoppers.”

Parker mentioned EP Wealth was launched to the agency by Rush Benton, who retired in 2024 as Captrust’s head of mergers and acquisitions to start out his personal funding financial institution in Nashville, Gorman Jones.

Whereas Parker mentioned expertise, not geography, is the driving drive behind EP Wealth’s acquisitions, the corporate has additional expanded its footprint within the Southeast, which incorporates workplaces in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.

“We’re excited to be a part of EP to each probably increase our breadth of companies and supply deeper partnerships,” Criterion’s Horner mentioned in a press release.

EP Wealth didn’t disclose the phrases of the deal, which closed in January. It was the second main deal within the Music Metropolis introduced this week. On Monday, one other serial acquirer, Mercer International Advisors, introduced that it had closed a take care of a $660 million RIA within the Nashville metro space—additionally its first in that location.

Torrance, Calif.-based EP Wealth undertook an acquisition binge in 2024 with seven offers that boosted AUM by roughly $10 billion from its $21.4 billion in shopper property as of the top of 2023. That development included the agency closing its largest Midwest acquisition thus far in December, a Michigan-based RIA with about $1.6 billion in shopper property.

Parker mentioned the agency’s development plans for 2025 are just like these in 2024 and, in some methods, going again to 2017, when Wealth Companions Capital Group first took a stake within the agency and began to help with its M&A. That technique is to maintain “the lengthy sport in thoughts” for a agency nonetheless majority-owned and managed by administration and its co-founders, Derek Holman and Brian Parker, and has 90 workers with fairness stakes.

Personal fairness funding can be serving to EP Wealth’s development, with Berkshire Companions taking a minority stake in 2020.

“We’re an aggressive development firm, however that’s largely born out of the truth that we see tens of 1000’s of people that want fee-based monetary planning,” Parker mentioned. “We’re spending cash proper now on expertise and infrastructure—there are too many enterprise college case research that present that in case your development outstrips your provide strains and also you weren’t taking good care of the folks that received you there, it gained’t be sustainable.”

To construct these companies, Parker mentioned the agency is concentrated on three areas: executing at a excessive degree in core areas of tax planning, property planning, belief companies, investments and operations; leveraging expertise to enhance and convey extra personalization to the shopper expertise; and persevering with so as to add and domesticate advisor expertise.

To that ultimate level, he notes that the agency employed its first-ever folks officer, Megan Glover, final 12 months and introduced on former SageView Advisory Group government Jorge Bernal as chief working officer.

“What’s underappreciated proper now’s profitable the struggle for expertise,” Parker mentioned. “In case you don’t have nice folks throughout the board, you aren’t going to have the ability to maintain the expansion charges that folks really feel is feasible.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *