D.A. Davidson & Co., which has quietly built a formidable financial services outfit far from clamor of Wall Street, on Monday announced two moves that impact its advisory business in two very different markets.

Great Falls, Mont.-based D.A. Davidson has acquired Smith Hayes Companies, a financial services firm with about $4 billion in assets under management and administration at its broker-dealer and registered investment advisor subsidiaries. Headquartered in Lincoln, Neb., Smith Hayes has two other Nebraska offices in Omaha and Columbus.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

D.A. Davidson has existing offices in Lincoln and Omaha, and the company sees the deal as a way to expand its reach in both cities and in the state.

“We like the Nebraska market, it fits our culture,” says Jim Kerr, president and CEO of D.A. Davidson & Co. “We know how to do business in smaller and medium-sized communities around the country.”

D.A. Davidson specializes in investment advice and planning, with 65 percent of that business focused on individual clients and 35 percent on institutional clients in the equity and fixed-income capital markets.

Its retail client base ranges from the mass affluent to the ultra-high-net-worth market, and roughly 60 percent of that is fee-based.

Kerr says D.A. Davidson and Smith Hayes share a similar client base, and adds that Smith Hayes’ retirement business brings another element to the table.

“They’ve become experts in the retirement area, and their fee-based business, as a percentage of the total business, is higher than ours,” he says. “That expertise will help us as an organization.”

Smith Hayes adds more than 30 advisors to the fold, where they join nearly 400 existing advisors at D.A. Davidson. The deal boosts total assets under management and administration to nearly $40 billion at D.A. Davidson’s individual investor group, which is its preferred term for its private client group.

Kerr says neither company initiated the deal per se, but it evolved over time during business discussions between the two firms and it made sense for both companies on several different levels: comparable client types and company cultures; it would help ease the growing regulatory costs that a small company such as Smith Hayes has to contend with; and it helps D.A. Davidson achieve its stated desire to grow its operations.

For now, Nebraska is the company’s easternmost beachhead on the retail side. But it could be open to further expansion in the future. “The Internet has created an opportunity for us to go to new places,” Kerr says. “We’re open to the small towns in the Midwest.”

He notes the Smith Hayes name will change to D.A. Davidson at a later date.

Along those lines, the company also announced on Monday that Crowell, Weedon & Co., a full-service brokerage and money management firm based in Los Angeles which D.A. Davidson bought in 2013, will be rebranded with the D.A. Davidson name. It had been operating under the banner of Crowell, Weedon & Co., a division of D.A. Davidson & Co.

“We respect the name Crowell, Weedon, but the synergies of having one brand outweighed the multiple brand approach,” Kerr says. “We’re small enough to where focusing on one brand gives us a lot more power than focusing on two or three different brands.”

In addition, the company announced that Tom Smith, chairman of Smith Hayes, and Andrew Crowell, president of Crowell, Weedon, will both become a vice chairman of D.A. Davidson’s individual investor group, effective immediately. And Smith Hayes president and CEO John Decker will oversee all Nebraska operations for D.A. Davidson’s individual investor group after the deal closes.

D.A. Davidson, which bills itself as the largest full-service investment firm headquartered in the Northwest, has major business hubs in Denver, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle.