CAPTRUST Pushing Ahead with Wealth Management Acquisitions

CAPTRUST has announced two additional acquisitions of wealth management firms, this time scooping up McQueen, Ball & Associates and Cornerstone Capital Advisors.

According to Fielding Miller, founder and CEO of CAPTRUST, the acquisitions bring in over $2 billion of new client assets and expand the firm’s presence in Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio.

Founded by Jerry McQueen in 1981 and located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the advisory firm of McQueen, Ball & Associates manages $1.3 billion of client assets. Its team provides financial planning and investment management services for individuals, families, small businesses and institutions.

Cornerstone Capital Advisors, led by Mario Giganti, is located in Green, Ohio, and oversees $770 million in client assets. The Cornerstone team utilizes goal-based financial planning to help individuals and families, with a focus on high-income professionals and entrepreneurs. In addition, the firm’s fiduciary services team assists businesses and nonprofits with their retirement plans and endowments.

Speaking earlier this year with PLANADVISER about CAPTRUST’s planned merger and acquisition activity, Miller and other firm leaders emphasized the importance of bringing together personal wealth management and retirement plan services business for future growth and profitability.

The CAPTRUST leaders said they are eagerly building business models that can support advisers working with both private wealth management and institutional clients—adding that serving retirement plans and private individuals simultaneously does not mean its advisers will be aggressively soliciting rollovers or engaging in other potentially problematic cross-selling behaviors barred by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Instead, they said, 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 plan system matures and becomes a key component of individuals’ retirement income.

“When I talk to a lot of our institutionally focused peers, they’re all trying to figure out their relationship with the wealth management space,” said Rick Shoff, managing director of the CAPTRUST Advisor Group. “We are going down the route of doing both private wealth and retirement business because we know that, ultimately, all the people we are helping within the institutional plans, they’re eventually going to have to do something with that money. For that reason, we believe that being holistic is important for our future and for our clients’ wellbeing.”