Concurrent buys Spire's 30-plus teams in first RIA platform deal

Concurrent closed its first purchase of an entire RIA platform, an asset purchase that brings more than 30 advisor teams and about $5.4 billion in client assets from Spire Investment Partners and lifts the firm to $28.6 billion; no purchase price appears in the coverage. The number of teams arriving at once is why the platform label matters: a buyer taking on 30-odd teams gets a recruiting pipeline, practices already used to someone else's compliance and technology, and clients it can eventually move onto its own, whereas a buyer paying for one large book gets a book.

The Spire group amounts to almost a fifth of Concurrent's assets, and under $180 million a team is the arithmetic of breadth rather than of concentration. That reading is inference rather than disclosure, and the transaction's shape fits two other wealth-management deals reported alongside it.

HB Wealth Management closed its purchase of Wealth Care, an Austin RIA with about $700 million in assets, on Sept. 30, lifting the firm to its seventh market with terms not disclosed; the team coming over spans two generations and serves physicians. A firm with seven markets has seven places to put an advisor it recruits, which is not the same asset as a larger book in a market it already covers.

Hightower agreed to buy Sandy Cove, a $752 million firm, for its W-2 channel, where advisers sit on the payroll rather than running independent practices; the agreement would lift Hightower Signature Wealth past $40 billion, would be the channel's third external acquisition this year, and would add Sandy Cove under 2 percent of the assets the channel would hold afterward. What Hightower is buying there is a repeatable way to add advisers.

None of the three acquisitions carried a disclosed purchase price, which makes the stretch a poor one for anyone trying to benchmark RIA multiples and fits what these buyers went after. A book of business can be argued about in terms of revenue or assets; 30 teams, a seventh market and a payroll channel are harder to hang on a multiple. The likely consequence is that consideration in deals of this type tracks what it would cost to build the capacity rather than the price of the assets themselves.

Arax reached for the same capability without buying anything, adding private capital markets services through a partnership with KingsRock that covers capital raising, structured financing and strategic advisory for Arax clients; no price and no equity stake were named, and the coverage does not say whether any ownership changed hands. Measured against the three transactions, the arrangement adds a private-markets function without adding a payroll, a market or a team, and for a firm positioning itself between clients and private capital that is the cheaper path.

Retention is the test from here. Concurrent has to hold teams that arrived as a group rather than being courted one at a time, and Hightower Signature Wealth would hold more than $40 billion once Sandy Cove closes, with a fourth external acquisition in that channel the next question the W-2 strategy invites. Whether Concurrent's next purchase is another platform-sized one, or a return to single practices, is the next thing to watch; the announcements carried no figure that answers either.