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Deals Of The Day: The Latest In Wealth Management,M&A – Carson Group, Applied, MSCI, Aspen
Editorial Staff
4 March 2026
Carson Group, Applied Financial Planning MSCI
Carson Group has acquired partner firm Applied Financial Planning, led by managing partners and wealth advisors William O’Connor and Sean Walker.
The acquired business, based in Irvine, California, oversees about $635 million in advisory and brokerage assets. Founded by O’Connor in 1986, it has seven advisors and a support team of 11 people.
Applied Financial Planning provides financial planning, investment management, retirement and estate planning and tax strategy. It affiliated with Carson in 2020.
“Carson has been part of our story for many years,” said O’Connor. “We were early believers in the vision of building a 100-year firm designed to outlast any one of us.”
Applied Financial is Carson Wealth’s 39th wholly owned location.
Carson manages more than $56 billion in assets and serves via an advisory network of 165-plus partner offices, including more than 50 Carson Wealth locations.
MSCI has acquired Vantager, an AI platform that streamlines pre-investment due diligence for institutional private markets investors.
Founded in 2024 and based in New York, Vantager has built an AI-led solution to help investors more efficiently extract and analyze unstructured documents issued by general partners in data rooms. The platform helps automate early-stage diligence by generating AI-powered reports and standardized outputs to support decision-making for investors, including asset owners, wealth managers, fund of funds, and secondaries, MSCI said.
The financial size of the acquisition wasn’t disclosed, MSCI said, and the cost is not expected to be material to MSCI. Vantager’s financial results will be presented as part of MSCI’s All Other – Private Assets reportable segment.
“Due diligence is one of the most time consuming and fragmented stages of private markets investing, yet also one of the most critical,” Luke Flemmer, head of private assets at MSCI, said. “Vantager brings innovative AI capabilities that help automate this step, enabling investors to make better and faster decisions. This acquisition further strengthens our private assets strategy to bring pre-trade and post-trade management into a single, self-service client experience.”
Aspen, BlueSky
Aspen Standard Wealth has acquired BlueSky Wealth Advisors, a North Carolina-based RIA with $1 billion in assets under management.
BlueSky, whose CEO is David Blain, was founded in 1999.
Aspen has acquired six other RIAs since launching in late 2024: MG Financial; SKY Investment Group, LLC; New England Private Wealth Advisors, LLC; Martel Wealth Advisors; DHK Financial Advisors; and Summitry.