Captrust is adding RINET Company, a Boston-based firm with about $2.2 billion in managed assets, into its fold. The deal marks Captrust's 53rd acquisition since 2006 and its eighth this year alone, a record for the company.
RINET was founded in 1974, and is helmed by Brian Rivotto, Gary Savage and Rebecca Pouliot, who will join Captrust along with 26 other employees. Boston Private Bank bought RINET in 1999, but Rivotto and seven others took it private following the 2008 financial crisis, he said.
Rivotto said RINET had been seeking a deal to satisfy clients, employees and partners alike, and found that Captrust fit their preference for a client-first, fee-only service. Captrust’s size also offered opportunities for employees’ long-term career paths, as one’s progression in the company would not be capped by an immediate supervisor.
“When you’re a smaller firm, you’re wearing many different hats. Captrust takes some of those hats and does them for us,” Rivotto said. “Our growth comes from client referrals, and the better job we do with existing clients, the more referrals we get, and that’s really going to help us there.”
According to Rush Benton, a senior director for strategic growth at Captrust, RINET was an “obvious fit” based on its client base, location and focus on family office services like tax, retirement and estate planning. Captrust steadily built its Boston presence for years, according to Benton, including acquiring Boston Advisors’ wealth management division in 2019, and this year’s acquisition of Cammack Retirement Group, a NYC/Boston firm with $154 billion in retirement assets.
Benton said while the Boston Advisors acquisition boosted Captrust’s investment advice offerings for clients, adding RINET would strengthen its family office services like cash flow, retirement and estate planning focused on the ultra-high-net-worth marketplace. Captrust also acts as an advisor to a number of companies for their retirement plans, and people in those companies increasingly look to the firm for help with their personal wealth management needs.
“Leveraging wealth management talent into those relationships is a nice recipe for organic growth and new clients, and we’re constantly looking for those opportunities,” Benton said.
Benton said Captrust intended to keep building out its family office service offerings nationwide (noting they’d already acquired Covenant Family Offices this year, another firm with significant family office services based in Texas and Oklahoma). Since every firm comes under the Captrust fold into a single entity, Benton said it would be easier to expand on what RINET offers Boston clients to customers in different regions.
“It’s all about scale; if you have enough of that around the country, and you start to pull it together, then you have a better offering than any one location would have on its own,” Benton said. “That’s what we’re doing, and that’s why the folks at RINET are a great fit for that.”
Rivotto said most of RINET’s client base extended about 40 miles beyond Boston, adding that New England was a prime location for “stealth wealth,” which could reap benefits but can be more difficult to find.
“Businesses are very successful but quiet, and we’ve gotten very good at finding them through our clients,” he said.
In addition to the Cammack Retirement Group and Covenant Family Offices deals from earlier this year, Captrust has added Ellwood Associates, a Chicago-based 55-person team with about $85 billion in assets among 200 clients. In January, the firm added MRA Associates, a $3.29 billion RIA with a significant Southwest presence and a focus on ultra-high-net-worth clients. As of the end of September, Captrust oversaw more than $85 billion in AUM and more than $660 billion in assets under advisement.