Raleigh, N.C.-based CAPTRUST, a prominent institutional consulting firm, announced Tuesday that it is acquiring CapTrust Advisors of Tampa, Fla.

Both firms are separate entities, despite the shared name. They primarily consult to retirement plans, and were originally part of the independent CapTrust unit started by the Interstate Johnson Lane brokerage firm. CapTrust was disbanded when Wachovia bought ILJ in 1999, and its advisors dispersed, many forming their own advisory firms.

As a result, both CAPTRUST and CapTrust Advisors have known each other for almost two decades. “We understand [CapTrust Advisors] and its culture intimately,” said Fielding Miller, CAPTRUST chief executive, in a statement.

Managing principals Roger Robson, Stephen Schott and Eric Bailey are the primary owners of CapTrust Advisors.

CAPTRUST consults on a non-discretionary basis on about $220 billion, most of it for retirement plan sponsors and other institutions. The institutional business is done on a retainer-fee basis, Miller said in an interview. CapTrust Advisors follows a similar business model, consulting on about $19 billion of institutional assets.

CapTrust Advisors will take on the CAPTRUST name.  The combined firms will have 34 offices nationwide, with 138 advisors. Terms were not disclosed.

The deal is the 26th CAPTRUST has done over its history, and it is the sixth merger the firm has completed this year.

“We’re definitely building a national presence,” Miller told Financial Advisor magazine. “And there’s a lot more we want to do.”

Scale is one benefit of expansion. “The [combined] assets we have, at $240 billion, that gives us a lot of clout with asset managers and vendors, so when we pick up phone, we get access to the portfolio managers,” he said.

Size also allows CAPTRUST to fill its ranks with managers who are specialists in their roles. “That gives you a lot of momentum in the business,” Miller said.

CAPTRUST requires sellers of the firms it buys to take at least half the proceeds in stock. “We want the cultural buy-in to what we’re doing,” Miller said. “Once they see what we’re doing and that it’s a tax-free exchange” some sellers take even more stock.

Wealth management is growing in importance at investment-management consulting firms like CAPTRUST, which has increased its retail focus in the last few years.

Individual clients make up 35 percent of revenues, Miller says. “It’s big business for us. The six acquisitions we’ve done this year were wealth-management oriented.”

Demand for wealth management is strong, the institutional side has become more competitive, and there are more acquisition opportunities within the wealth-management universe, he said.

But the institutional side isn’t going away. “It’s very good sticky business,” Miller said.

Institutional consulting was built to deliver a fiduciary level of services for ERISA plans, and advisors in the original CapTrust had to escape the traditional-firm environment to minimize conflicts. Miller sees a similar change now being forced on the brokerage industry.

“The brokerage world is, frankly, broken,” he said. The big Wall Street firms “need to reinvent themselves to be viable 20 years from now. The [DOL] fiduciary rule was a shot across the bow.”