When it was created a few years ago as a wealth management holding company, Atria Wealth Solutions in New York said it was setting out to "reinvent" the independent advisor service mode.
Since then, the company has acquired three broker-dealers and, on Tuesday, announced a deal to acquire a fourth: NEXT Financial Group of Houston.
When that deal is closed, as expected sometime in the first quarter, it means Atria will be servicing four subsidiaries comprising nearly 2,000 advisors with about $65 billion under advisement.
That represents a decent chunk of scale, but Atria CEO and co-founder Doug Ketterer emphasized that the consolidation is not what drives the company. Rather, he said, it's transforming the industry's service model.
"Our strategy is to deliver what our advisors and, by extension, their clients need," said Ketterer, who was a Morgan Stanley executive before starting Atria. "We think in the independent advisor channel, advisors have been left alone. They look to their home office largely as a utilty, and those days are long gone."
The NEXT acquisition, the financial details of which have not been disclosed, will bring over 500 advisors and about $13 billion of assets in administration to the company. Atria will buy 100 percent of NEXT under the deal, in addition to NEXT's sister companies, Next Financial Insurances Services Company and Visionary Asset Management.
Atria is pursuing a multi-channel approach as it buys up companies. NEXT and subsidiary SPR and Cadaret, Grant & Co. of Syracuse, N.Y., serve the independent advisor channel, while subsidiaries CUSO Financial Services L.P. (CFS) and Sorrento Pacific Financial LLC, both based in San Diego, serve the investment programs of credit unions and banks.
Atria, meanwhile, is designed to serve the umbrella pulling them together with a technology platform and service model that delivers customized solutions for subsidiaries' advisors and their clients, company executives said.
The company, which has its own in-house engineers and developers, had made a multimillion-dollar investment in its platform that is focused on enhancing the interaction between advisors and clients, said Atria COO Eugene Elias.
"It really starts with the advisor," Elias said. "The approach is not to assume what we think they need, but to go out in the field and spend time in their offices."