Modern Wealth Management, a Monterey, Calif.-based RIA firm launched from roll-ups less than a year ago, has entered the retirement planning market by acquiring Beltz Ianni & Associates, a retirement plan advisor with $1.2 billion in assets under management.

Modern Wealth said it intends to roll out its new retirement services to other acquired firms.

It is Modern Wealth's sixth acquisition since it was formed by three ex-Goldman Sachs executives in April. The deal elevates the firm to more than $3 billion in AUM. Aside from the initial three-firm roll-up that gave Modern Wealth its initial footprint, this was the firm’s largest acquisition to date, said Jason Gordo, the firm’s co-founder and president.

Beltz Ianni, in Rochester, N.Y., brings $700 million in managed retirement plan assets and $500 million in individual wealth management assets. It also brings its “Total Retirement Plan Management” solution, which provides professional retirement plan services to small and mid-size companies, a firm statement said.

In joining Modern Wealth, Beltz Ianni is dropping its affiliation with LPL Financial.

Beltz Ianni’s retirement package offers employers fiduciary risk management, fee benchmarking, retirement vendor selection, employee education resources, and third-party administration support, among other retirement plan services.

What this does for the Modern Wealth ecosystem is bring a mature, specialist retirement plan offering to all of the firm’s advisors and their clients, Gordo said. He emphasized that advisor firms with just a couple of retirement plans clients can’t legitimately call themselves retirement specialists.

“Among our early acquisitions, there’s a handful of company retirement plans in each of those businesses,” he said. “For the first time, they now have a real specialist in their corner.”

Michelle Cannan leads the retirement plan team at Beltz Ianni and will continue to do so for Modern Wealth. She said Beltz Ianni launched in 2001 as a financial planning and wealth management firm. But when some new partners arrived with a history of work in the retirement plan industry, including one who had been a partial owner of a record-keeper, the firm naturally started building a retirement team to capitalize on that knowledge and relationship.

“Everybody on the retirement team is a retirement plan specialist. We don’t work with individuals,” she said. “When there’s an opportunity for financial planning or wealth management, we refer over to our colleagues who specialize in that area.”

Cannan said that the purchase by Modern Wealth provides her team and the wealth management side of Beltz Ianni with a way to scale that business and also enhance it in a couple of different ways.

For example, Cannan noted Modern Wealth’s weekly newsletters, podcasts and videos were tremendous vehicles for educational content that can be rolled out to all of Beltz Ianni’s retirement plan employees.

“We now have specialists in tax and estate planning that we didn’t have previously, so it’s just a wider breadth of services across the board,” she said. “I’m excited to be able to grow and provide the Total Retirement Plan service to more companies on a national footprint. That’s just really exciting to be able to do that.”

Gordo said together the firms will be able to offer tax and estate planning, but that Modern Wealth also wants to offer risk management solutions, including “life, long-term care and disability policy distribution and delivery,” he said. “You’ll see a lot more action from us in the coming months.”