Tiedemann WM Agrees To Buy Seattle-Based Threshold Group

Tom Burroughes

13 October 2017

The wealth management carousel continues to spin.

Tiedemann Wealth Management, a New York-based wealth advisor with about $12 billion in assets under advisement, has agreed to buy Seattle-headquartered Threshold Group, a wealth-advisory firm and family office with $3.4 billion in assets under management.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed in a report on Tiedemann’s website. Media reports also did not state what was paid.

The acquirer is a year younger than Threshold . Tiedemann was founded in 1999 by Carl Tiedemann, the former president of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

Reports said the transaction is expected to close in December this year.

Tiedemann Wealth Management is a RIA and has offices in New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Palm Beach, Washington, DC and Wilmington, DE.

Among recent M&A deals in wealth management are those of Associated Banc-Corp, which earlier in October agreed to acquire Whitnell & Co, a wealth management and multi-family office services firm based in Oak Brook, Illinois. The transaction is due to complete in November. California-headquartered Mercer Advisors, meanwhile, acquired a financial planning and investments firm, Ray Mignone Associates, with $290 million of assets under management. In September, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce completed its acquisition of a Chicago-based private wealth management firm, Geneva Advisors.

Consolidation and M&A are driven by forces such as a need for economies of scale in an increasingly regulated sector, with demands from clients for more digital and sophisticated offerings also requiring more scale. Such a trend has been visible among RIAs, for example.

To capture such trends, ECHELON Partners, US-based investment bank for the wealth and investment management industry, in June this year launched RIA Group, a new entity designed to manage businesses focused specifically on the registered investment advisor industry.