Cresset pulls $4B UBS team into Boca Raton

Cresset, the multifamily office and private investment firm, said in a release this week that it has opened its first Boca Raton office with the Aug. 25 arrival of a 16-person UBS Financial Services team with roughly $4 billion in client assets, led by veteran advisors Michael Bober and Ed Ventrice.

Bober and Ventrice, both managing directors at UBS before the move, each spent more than 30 years in the business and began as certified public accountants at national accounting firms, a foundation Cresset says shaped the team's integrated approach to coordinating advice across every aspect of a client's financial life. They arrive with Michael MacDonald, William "Billy" Marino, Sarah Ponczek, and Alex Santos, and a clientele spanning corporate executives, business owners, high-net-worth individuals, multigenerational families, foundations and endowments, and professional athletes.

Those accounting roots give the liftout its shape: business succession planning is the entry point to the private-markets products that Cresset and other multifamily offices use to differentiate their platforms, and this team arrives with those relationships already in hand. Cresset, which reports more than $260 billion in assets under management and advisement, is putting that balance sheet behind a South Florida push built on alternatives.

Cranston said in the release that the team's relationships run deep in the Boca Raton community, and Ventrice described the move as a natural fit: "Cresset's family office approach closely aligns with how we have always believed wealth should be managed—with a comprehensive, long-term perspective that extends well beyond investment management."

The Boca Raton liftout follows Cresset's late-last-month recruitment of a two-advisor Lazard Wealth group that oversaw about $1 billion in assets under advisement, a move that expanded the firm's Los Angeles and New York presence. The pattern is a firm scaling by whole teams rather than individual producers—a faster way to build a family-office footprint and a message to the next wirehouse group about the platform it could land on.

This is the right trade for Cresset, and it lowers the floor for every firm trying to hold onto relationship-heavy teams. The talent war has moved to platform engineering. A firm that can absorb a 16-person group and hand it a private-markets product shelf is a harder competitor than one that simply writes a bigger check. UBS loses more than a $4 billion book here; it loses a template for serving business owners in a market where the family-office wrapper now has the scale to match the wirehouse bench.