Concurrent buys $5.4B Spire and sets a $3B-to-$10B platform target

The $5.4 billion hybrid RIA Spire Investment Partners, founded in 1997 and based in McLean, Virginia, becomes Concurrent's first platform acquisition and takes the Tampa buyer to 33 states with $28.6 billion in assets under management plus $18 billion in corporate retirement plan assets under advisement, while supplying infrastructure to more than 30 advisor teams across 14 states; no purchase price or multiple appears in the coverage of the deal.

Nate Lenz, Concurrent's chief executive, has set the next target at $3 billion to $10 billion in assets—firms that have built their own scale and culture, shown repeatable growth, and would still benefit from a platform behind them. He told InvestmentNews he wants one or two such transactions a year and called Spire "just the first of what we hope to be a number of deals like this." InvestmentNews frames the appetite as additions of up to twice Spire's size, a figure that reaches slightly past the $10 billion top of the range Lenz puts on the record.

Concurrent's earlier purchase shows what the new appetite actually means. Next Retirement Solutions, the 401(k)-focused business Concurrent bought last year at roughly $10 billion in retirement assets, remains the largest acquisition by assets; Spire is the largest by revenue. The difference is the mix: Next's book is corporate retirement plan 3(21) and 3(38) consulting work, and Lenz told InvestmentNews the revenue on those assets is much lower. A buyer choosing between a $10 billion plan-consulting book and a $5.4 billion advisory book is making a call about revenue density, and Concurrent's own comparison of the two deals says which side it prefers.

Both firms run on a 1099 independent-contractor model, which shapes what a platform purchase of this kind transfers: seventeen Spire home-office staff will move into Concurrent, and McLean becomes Concurrent's fourth home office alongside Tampa, Dallas and San Diego, while the more than 30 advisor teams Spire supports stay independent contractors. The coverage does not say whether any portion of the $5.4 billion is committed by contract, retention arrangement or earnout—and for a business whose advisors are contractors rather than employees, those are the terms that usually determine what a deal was actually worth, with no price disclosed against which to judge them.

Concurrent is hunting in a market that has flipped: the number of RIA acquisitions is shrinking while the assets inside them grow, and total client assets involved in M&A transactions jumped 88% to $343 billion, according to Fidelity's midyear report. Fewer transactions, each larger, add up to a seller's market across the middle of the size range, and $3 billion to $10 billion sits in the middle of it—the band where an owner with real scale can weigh a bid against staying independent.

Merchant Investment Management has backed Concurrent since July 2021, and a cadence of one or two platform deals a year implies committed capital rather than a wish; the coverage does not say how large that commitment is or how much of it is unspent. This publication has argued that deal size in wealth management is now a test of integration capacity—that acquirers are paying for the staff and systems to absorb what they buy rather than for the assets alone, and Spire is a clean test case: seventeen home-office people arriving, a fourth office opening, and the advisor teams to keep in place.

Concurrent's older engine is recruiting, and on this year's numbers it is the bigger one: Lenz says the firm has brought in more than $6 billion in assets from individual advisor teams so far this year. The recruiting channel has moved more assets this year than the Spire purchase adds. Recruited assets and an acquired platform are different things, and the only measure both share is assets; on that measure, the platform program is still the smaller contributor.

The seller side is a familiar shape: Spire dates to 1997 and was founded by David Blisk, and this publication has tracked owners of that vintage moving exits forward since the pandemic—Wilmington Trust's Marguerite Weese describes pandemic memories as pulling owners to sell. What is less familiar is the buyer: a firm that grew on 1099 recruiting now paying for whole platforms with their own cultures and their own home-office payrolls.

One or two transactions a year in a $3 billion-to-$10 billion band is either a program or a posture, and the difference shows up in the next announcement—at the top of that range, the next platform would be close to twice the one Concurrent has just bought.