2020 M&A Action Continues: Shine Wealth Partners Joins CAPTRUST

CAPTRUST Financial Advisors has announced that Shine Wealth Partners is joining the firm.

The deal represents another step forward in CAPTRUST’s ongoing plan to create a national advisory firm that provides both retirement plan services and individual/family wealth management.

Shine Wealth Partners was established in 1995 and advises on more than $785 million from individuals and families. It is led by Founder and CEO Judy Shine, who will be joined at CAPTRUST by President and Senior Wealth Adviser Karen Salvatore, Senior Wealth Advisers and Principals Beth Cornell and Elisabeth Jacobson, and Senior Wealth Adviser Peter Vander Ploeg. They bring along with them four additional team members.

“Judy is someone that I have known for a long time, and I greatly admire the practice she has built in Colorado,” says Rush Benton, CAPTRUST senior director, strategic growth. “Judy and her team have long been focused on doing what’s right for their clients, which is a core component of our mission at CAPTRUST. I have great confidence that their practice will continue to grow and flourish, especially as they tap into our centralized resources.”

With this deal, the Denver-based Shine Wealth Partners becomes the fifth firm that has joined CAPTRUST this year, and the third woman-led firm added since 2019. Shine Wealth Partners will also become CAPTRUST’s first location in Colorado. As with all firms that join CAPTRUST, Shine Wealth Partners will transition to the CAPTRUST name and branding.

This latest deal underscores CAPTRUST’s stated intention to build a business model that can support advisers working with both private wealth management and institutional retirement plan clients. The firm’s leadership has told PLANADVISER that serving retirement plans and private individuals does not mean the firm will be aggressively soliciting rollovers or engaging in other potentially problematic cross-selling behaviors barred by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Instead, CAPTRUST’s leaders say building a firm that does both private wealth and institutional retirement plan business is about creating a holistic service ecosystem that clients want and need, especially as the defined contribution (DC) plan system matures and becomes a key component of individuals’ retirement income.

Beyond this new CAPTRUST deal, the rapid pace of mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity in the advisory industry has not been significantly derailed by the coronavirus pandemic and the related recession. Just yesterday, Baystate Fiduciary Advisors announced that it would be joining HUB International, while Fidelity’s freshly updated M&A report for the month of October noted it was the fifth consecutive month with 12 or more transactions representing at least $12 billion.

Since Fidelity began tracking adviser-focused acquisitions in 2016, only five individual months have exceeded these totals. Year to date, there have been 96 such transactions, representing $122.9 billion. Fidelity says this is nearly the same activity level as the year-to-date figure for October 2019—despite an extremely slow March, April and May in 2020.