BridgePort hires Osaic M&A veteran Tina Decker

BridgePort Financial Solutions has reached into Osaic's dealmaking bench for the executive it wants running its acquisition machine. The Phoenix-based registered investment advisor has named Tina Decker senior vice president of business development, placing her over the full M&A lifecycle—sourcing, financial modeling, due diligence, negotiation, and advisor onboarding—and giving her a seat in corporate strategy discussions.

Decker arrives after more than two decades at Osaic, where she held senior roles spanning operations, executive strategy, and succession planning and most recently served as vice president of M&A and succession planning. BridgePort says she negotiated or executed more than 400 transactions in that career, representing over $10 billion in acquired and retained assets, and co-created My Succession Plan, an interactive matching platform built to help advisors identify continuity and transition partners.

The succession platform is the part of the biography that matters: a 400-deal record says she can close a transaction, while the platform says she can open the conversation that leads to one, and for a firm selling growth and succession support to fee-only practices, the two are close to the same job.

The appointment lands as RIA M&A resets its own numbers: ECHELON Partners counted 142 transactions closed in the first quarter of 2026, an all-time record, with transacted AUM reaching $1.67 trillion, up 107% from $805 billion a year earlier. Buyers' appetite for fee-only RIAs has grown alongside that volume, as acquirers hunt for practices with clean revenue structures.

BridgePort operates inside that demand, running as an RIA for fee-only advisory firms that want to navigate growth and succession while preserving independence, supplying operational infrastructure, technology, and acquisition capital. It crossed $2 billion in assets under advisement in 2024 after buying Roseville, California-based PearTree Advisory Group, with roughly $275 million in AUA, and Indianapolis-based Premier Wealth Advisors, with roughly $140 million.

The management layer around Decker is already in place: Clara Sierra, another Osaic alumna, joined BridgePort as managing director in May, and Decker will report to her. Sierra said in the announcement that Decker brings M&A experience, industry relationships, and a practical understanding of what makes a transition work for advisors, firms, and clients.

The hire also extends a migration that has reshaped the top of the wealth industry since mid-August: Carson hired Osaic's Peterson in August, AE Wealth named Osaic's Shannon Larson president days later, and, as this publication has argued, wealth's talent war has moved from advisor teams into the C-suite. BridgePort is running the same play, with Sierra in May and Decker now.

What these executives have in common is the work they are being asked to do: Peterson is building Carson's independent channel, Larson is carrying an M&A record into AE Wealth's expansion plans, and Decker owns BridgePort's entire acquisition process. The common job description is putting capital to work in a market that already has enough buyers chasing the same small set of fee-only practices.

Decker's role is unusually broad for the size of firm she is joining: sourcing, financial modeling, due diligence, negotiation, and advisor onboarding—the kind of vertical ownership that usually belongs to a chief M&A officer. BridgePort's disclosed deals to date have been tuck-ins—a $275 million practice in California and a $140 million firm in Indiana—and Decker's 400 transactions give her a template for repeating that kind of accumulation at a higher cadence.

BridgePort thinks the next phase of fee-only M&A will be won before the auction starts. Record volume has pulled capital into the market; the scarcer input is the executive who has personally guided hundreds of owners through the decision. Decker is BridgePort's answer to that shortage, and her history with My Succession Plan tells prospective sellers that BridgePort is thinking about matching, continuity, and fit rather than merely writing checks.

BridgePort already has the capital story and the fee-only positioning. The constraint is having enough people who can sit with a founder, show them a firm that outlasts their own career, and turn that conversation into a signed agreement. Decker has sat on that side of the table more than 400 times, and BridgePort is betting she can do it at the scale of its own next chapter.