Levitt opens a New York base for Americans whose U.S. plans don't survive the move

France-based Levitt Capital Management has opened a first New York office in Rockefeller Center, a base the Nice-headquartered firm says will let it meet the American side of relationships that now span the Atlantic. The office, announced Monday, will serve U.S. citizens who have relocated to Europe and whose portfolios, wealth structures and succession plans were built for an American legal and tax environment. Founder and CIO Robert Levitt put the gap plainly: “Americans who relocate to Europe have uniquely complex financial needs, which advisers on either side of the Atlantic are ill-equipped to understand and address.” He said the firm receives multiple enquiries every day from Americans discovering that their U.S.-designed plans do not survive the move, because neither a U.S. adviser nor a European one sees the whole picture.

The client pool is not a rounding error. The Association of Americans Resident Overseas estimates 117,462 Americans lived in France in 2023, with larger cohorts in the U.K. (325,321) and Germany (238,652), and the U.K. count is the largest American expat population in Europe. That helps explain why so much recent transatlantic wealth activity has a U.K. component: InvestmentNews reported that Moneta Group Investment Advisors opened a U.K. office last month to serve U.S. expats and overseas family offices; Miami-based Corient, which first announced the addition of Stonehage Fleming and Stanhope Capital Group last year, completed the deal in June and pushed its global assets above $500 billion; and Wealthspire’s Ground Control division bought Arena Wealth, a U.K. business management firm serving professional golfers, in June, its second U.K. venture after the October 2024 purchase of Clay GBP.

Taken together, the moves mark the transatlantic client as a growth line rather than an afterthought. But not every expansion carries the same value. A generalist adding a London outpost is buying proximity; Levitt is buying a specialty—the tax and succession gap between two countries’ legal systems. Its bet is that the American living in Europe is a permanent client class, not a one-time problem to be solved at the airport, and the Rockefeller Center address puts the firm on the U.S. side of that divide, which matters when a plan spans two tax codes. In a market where the biggest RIAs are getting bigger, specialization is the durable edge, and it belongs to the firms that structure around that gap. The daily enquiry flow will show whether Levitt has built a pipeline to that client class or just added an address.