The biggest RIA firm in the U.S. is getting larger still.

Captrust Financial Advisors said Tuesday it added $54 billion in new client assets last year, largely from seven acquisitions, bringing advised assets to $248 billion.

The deal-making and organic growth added 128 employees to the Raleigh, N.C.-based firm, which now has 433 employees working in 35 offices nationwide and ranks No. 1 in the 2017 Financial Advisor magazine ranking of RIA assets.

Only about $6 billion to $7 billion of the asset pie is from wealth management clients, said Captrust CEO J. Fielding Miller. The rest is institutional and for the most part managed on a non-discretionary basis under retainer agreements.

But despite the relatively small size, wealth management now provides about a third of Captrust’s revenues and Miller’s plan is to keep building the individual investor base.

That’s a departure from the firm’s roots, which began within an independent unit called CapTrust, which was founded years ago within the Interstate Johnson Lane brokerage to support fiduciary services to institutional investors. CapTrust was disbanded when Wachovia bought ILJ in 1999.

Miller and a number of colleagues went on to found their own consulting firms, some keeping the CapTrust name.

A decade ago, Miller decided to expand Captrust Financial Advisors, betting that scale would become increasingly important.

He focused on the institutional side first, building to about 30 offices. “A year-and-a-half ago, we decided to go back into the same [geographic] markets and build the wealth management side, and partner the two [sides] together,” Miller said. “The reason is, we get a lot of referrals from the institutional side into the wealth management business.”

Five of the seven deals done last year were primarily wealth management shops.

That pace of deal-making may be unusual, Miller said. “Four to five [acquisitions] per year, that’s a good tempo for us,” he said.

The biggest one last year was the August purchase of CapTrust Advisors of Tampa, Fla., an institutional consulting firm with $19 billion of client assets and one of the original IJL-CapTrust refugees. ( /news/captrust-buys-captrust-advisors-34260.html )