New York-based Cantor Fitzgerald Wealth Partners has added advisors Jeff Schulte and Jim Hiles from Mariner Wealth Advisors, marking Cantor’s fourth acquisition in the last five months. Since Cantor Fitzgerald, known for its bond trading capabilities for institutional clients, launched its wealth management division in September, the firm has grown to $3.3 billion under advisement.
Cantor has been on the acquisition trail since making its first foray into the private client space late last year. Last month, the firm acquired Pittsburgh-based First Commonwealth Financial Advisors, with $2 billion in assets under advisement and led by Richard Applegate. Stan Gregor, president and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald Wealth Partners, said the firm has about a dozen deals in the pipeline for the coming months, the largest of which is $14 billion in assets.
Gregor said the firm expanded into wealth management to complement its other business lines. The firm also wanted to bring its institutional services to individual investors.
“What our focus was, and still is, is to provide that same high-quality touch, the same quality institutional-style services, but now to expand those services to private clients,” Gregor said.
For example, some of Cantor’s investment management partners require client minimums of $25 million to $50 million. But because of the firm’s relationships with those managers on the institutional side, clients can get access to those hedge funds and alternative strategies at a much lower minimum, Gregor said.
Other institutional services available to private clients include the firm’s fixed income platform, financial planning, comprehensive investment management, and the firm’s ETF group, which Cantor brought over from KCG.
All advisors who sign on get an equity stake in Cantor, which could go public at some point. The firm has 8,000 total employees across the globe, 1,000 of which are partners.
“If and when the company goes public, that’s obviously something that every partner will be excited about,” Gregor said.
“I’ve had people say, ‘This sounds like Goldman Sachs before they went public.’ Yeah, it's kind of that. It’s a club of people that care about their clients, and they’ll leverage the company’s resources to deliver a level of service that is just not an ordinary level of service.”
