Even as Christmas draws close, another M&A deal in the US wealth management sector is agreed.

United Capital Financial Advisers has acquired Payne Wealth Partners of Evansville, IN, bringing over a firm overseeing about $530 million in assets under management and 13 employees, continuing a run of M&A activity in US wealth management this year.

Taylor Payne, president of Payne Wealth Partners, will join United Capital as a managing director. Ann Pendley and Perry Moore were also co-owners of Payne Wealth Partners along with Payne. Their staff of 13 service about 300 households.

The business was established in 1989 as a fee-only investment manager. 

Today, United Capital has approximately $20.7 billion in assets under management and 88 offices, UC said in its statement.
 
Consolidation, M&A
Among recent deals this month, Boston-headquartered Anchor Capital Advisors, an asset manager and wealth advisory firm, agreed to buy back a majority ownership stake of its company from Boston Private, a wealth management, trust and private banking company. In a somewhat different deal, Geneva-based Reyl & Cie, the private bank and financial group, acquired a stake in Aspiration, a Los Angeles-based online bank, during a Series B funding round. Other deals across the US have included Louisiana- and Texas-based Whitney Bank (also known as Hancock Whitney), the banking subsidiary of Hancock Holding Company, agreeing to acquire the bank-managed high net worth individual and institutional investment management and trust business from Capital One Bank US, National Association, a banking subsidiary of Virginia-headquartered Capital One Financial Corporation.

 In November, for example, Iowa-based Heartland Financial USA agreed to acquire Minnesota-headquartered Signature Bancshares, parent of Signature Bank - which provides private banking and other services - for about $53.4 million, based on closing stock prices on November 10. Signature Bank is a commercial and private bank, headquartered in Minnetonka, MN. In October, Financial services firm Stifel Financial Corp has entered into an agreement to acquire Ziegler Wealth Management, a subsidiary of BC Ziegler & Company. In another part of the wealth space, Tiedemann Wealth Management, a New York-based wealth advisor with about $12 billion in assets under advisement, agreed to buy Seattle-headquartered Threshold Group, a wealth-advisory firm and family office with $3.4 billion in assets under management.

Among some other recent M&A deals in wealth management are those of Associated Banc-Corp, which earlier in October agreed to acquire Whitnell & Co, a wealth management and multi-family office services firm based in Oak Brook, Illinois. The transaction is due to complete in November. California-headquartered Mercer Advisors, meanwhile, acquired a financial planning and investments firm, Ray Mignone Associates, with $290 million of assets under management. In September, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce completed its acquisition of a Chicago-based private wealth management firm, Geneva Advisors. Consolidation and M&A are driven by forces such as a need for economies of scale in an increasingly regulated sector, with demands from clients for more digital and sophisticated offerings also requiring more scale.