Mariner Wealth Advisors, the Overland Park, Kan.-based RIA giant, has made its sixth acquisition this year—its first in Miami and its largest in Florida, with the purchase of Singer Xenos Schechter Sosler, a Coral Gables, Fla., firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management. This purchase and five others will add to the $22 billion in AUM Mariner reported on its last ADV.
“It’s by far our biggest purchase in Florida,” said Marty Bicknell, Mariner’s CEO. Previous purchases in the state were in the couple-hundred-million-dollar AUM range, he said.
Singer Xenos was founded in the late 1980s, and according to its most recent Form ADV the firm has 697 high-net-worth individual clients, plus 70 other individual clients. The firm also oversees assets for some charities and pensions.
Bicknell, Mariner’s founder, says that Singer Xenos has a much heftier average net worth per client, at $4 million (about double Mariner’s figure). The target firm’s clients are primarily based in Florida and are concentrated among physicians in high-risk specialties; small business owners; and women who are recently widowed, divorced or dealing with the sale of a business.
“These niches are a nice complement to Mariner Wealth Advisors as many of our locations also have these same specialties,” said Mariner in a statement.
The $4 million per client average is also interesting because Mariner has made its bones without asset minimums, the result of the firm’s dedication to serving the mass affluent, Bicknell said.
South Florida is famous as a wealth corridor and a likely plum area for any financial advisor’s growth. (The South Florida Business Journal said the state was home to 52 billionaires in 2018.) But it wasn’t just wealthy clients or the balmy beaches that attracted Mariner to the latest acquisition, but pure cultural fit. Bicknell said he first ran into the Singer Xenos team five years ago, but neither firm was in the right stead to merge. Now at $1.3 billion in assets, the Florida firm had started to see the same common growth pains others had, he said—there was too much business to run and not enough time for partners to meet with clients.
The partners were “looking for more opportunities for the entire organization to grow, specifically looking for others in the process to have the opportunity to participate and help fuel that growth.” One of the things Mariner Wealth offers is business development advisors who can work within its offices.
Singer Xenos Schechter Sosler has 16 associates; the firm’s partners Marc Singer, Faith Xenos, Neil Sosler and Jay Schechter will all stay on with Mariner, the firms said. The partners bring with them a deep bench of background expertise in areas like investment banking, bankruptcy law and private placements, but Bicknell says the firm is a traditional RIA.
Bicknell founded Mariner in 2006, using a vast war chest to go on an acquisition hunt (part of his wealth came from his family’s sale of its Pizza Hut franchise). The firm now has 35 offices in cities such as New York, Houston, Scottsdale, Tulsa, Kansas City and Los Angeles. Mariner has also purchased ancillary services such as tax planning firms, insurance companies and investment banks to serve advisor associates. Originally the plan was to spread to second-tier cities like Kansas City by putting pins on a map, said Bicknell. “We had absolutely zero success at that, so we kind of just backed up and said, ‘Let’s open up and try to be opportunistic and look for the right people, the right culture, the right team … and then decide if that’s a market we want to be in.’”