The consolidation trend in parts of the US wealth management sector continues.

Brown Advisory, the wealth management firm, is merging with a US peer, Virgina-based Signature Family Wealth Advisors, an organization serving clients with a total of $4.3 billion of assets. Brown Advisory, which is majority-owned by its own employees, oversees about $67 billion of assets.

The firms did not disclose financial terms of the merger deal when asked by Family Wealth Report about the matter.

“The brands will remain as they are for now, and all Signature colleagues and offices remain in full,” a spokesperson for Brown Advisory said.

The two businesses are almost exactly the same age: Brown Advisory was formed in 1993 and Signature a year later, with the latter firm formed by Anne Shumadine and Susan Colpitts. It is a registered investment advisor with a multi-family office practice. It has offices in Charlottesville, Norfolk and Richmond.

"The combination with Brown is a true strategic acquisition (as opposed to a financial acquisition) in the UHNW segment where, despite the headlines, there have been very few transactions.  While we don’t know the terms, on paper it’s a great deal for Brown as it extends their Mid-Atlantic footprint into the adjacent Virginia market.  Most importantly, the two firms appear to be culturally compatible which bodes well for their integration and future success," Jamie McLaughlin, of J H McLaughlin & Co - and a member of the Family Wealth Report editorial advisory board - said in a note.

Recent weeks and months have been busy on the wealth management M&A front. San Rafael, Marin County-based wealth management firm Private Ocean bought Mosaic Financial Partners, a San Francisco-based registered investment advisory firm. Mosaic has $620 million in assets under management as of the end of August. Another transaction saw iCapital Network, a financial technology investments platform, stating that it was buying Bank of America’s alternative investment feeder fund operations businesses, which represents about $20 billion in client assets. The US wealth management house CAPTRUST Financial Advisors bought a North Carolina-based wealth firm with about $400 million in AuM, its thirtieth deal since 2006, taking total AuA to $278 billion. One of the more eye-catching deals saw UBS shut the UK robo-advisory service, UBS SmartWealth, which was launched in 2016, and sell the technology to US digital wealth manager SigFig.

An expected $30 trillion shift of wealth from the aging Baby Boomer generation - creating a big demand for advice - and the sense that wealth management is a more lucrative business to be in than some more capital-intensive financial sectors, has made firms in the space an attractive target.