Oklahoma City-based Exencial Wealth Advisors has bought Shoreline Financial Advisors of Guilford, Conn., with roughly $220 million in assets under management.

The deal, finalized earlier this month, allows Shoreline’s founders, brothers Patrick and Brendan Smith, to offload some of the more onerous tasks of running a business, focus on their clients and ultimately retire, they said.

For Exencial, an independent RIA with $4 billion in AUM, Shoreline is the firm’s first acquisition since 2020. It expands the firm's 15-year presence in Connecticut. Shoreline is its third acquisition in the state.

The Smiths founded Shoreline in the summer of 1996 in the New Haven area, and many of the firm’s 270 client households are attached to Yale University and its affiliated hospital system.

As such, the science-focused clientele sparked to Shoreline’s philosophy and investment approach, Patrick Smith said, which included an emphasis on Dimensional Fund Advisors funds, widely known for data-heavy research.

“Dimensional is very deliberate, very structured, and tends to deliver what is promised,” he said. “We believe in that approach, and so do our clients.”

In fact, the Smiths so much wanted their clients to continue to have that same data-driven guidance that when they decided to look for a succession solution a couple of years ago, they started by calling the other Dimensional fans in the area, they said. One of them, the Old Lyme, Conn., office of Exencial, run by founder and CEO John Burns, stood above the others.

“We talked with a couple of other firms in Massachusetts and Connecticut to make sure we were doing our due diligence,” Brendan Smith said. “But we really enjoyed speaking with John‘s team the best. It was a great cultural fit. We wanted someone to feel about our clients the way we did, and it was clear that would be the case.”

As they talked more with Exencial, a plan emerged, they said. The Smiths would sell Shoreline but acquire equity in Exencial, keeping them invested in the business while offloading the most onerous tasks, not least of which they felt was compliance.

“It just gets bigger every year,” Patrick said.

“They never take anything away,” Brendan added.