Cresset Bought a Business, Not a $4 Billion Book

Michael Bober and Ed Ventrice have run the same client list through four firms together — Smith Barney from 1992, then Stillpoint Wealth, Stanford Group and Oppenheimer & Co., and finally UBS in 2015. As of Tuesday, it is five. The 16-person group they co-lead, which UBS's former firm website called the BV Group, has joined Cresset in Boca Raton, Florida, bringing with it the roughly $4 billion in client assets the team managed at the wirehouse.

The coverage names six advisors in the group: Bober, Ventrice, Michael MacDonald, William "Billy" Marino, Sarah Ponczek and Alex Santos. Both principals were managing directors at UBS and had spent 11 years there, according to WealthManagement.com, and both began their careers as certified public accountants before moving into wealth management — a background Cresset cites in describing the team's integrated approach to client service, per InvestmentNews, which also reports that each man brings more than three decades of experience.

Their client list is the one to read closely: corporate executives, business owners, high-net-worth and multigenerational families, foundations and endowments, and professional athletes. Alongside the investment work the group handles institutional consulting and business succession planning, and those last two are what make this move more interesting than its price tag.

The name is a small tell. The group operated under its own banner at UBS rather than a branch label, and the reporting names four advisors beneath the two principals. That is the shape of an enterprise changing hands more than a producer changing employers, and it is the harder hole to fill: there is no single relationship to save.

A team running endowment mandates and succession work for business owners is operating a family office inside a brokerage, and a brokerage prices the investment relationship while treating the rest as service. Cresset has spent nine years building the rest. Founded in 2017 as a family office for the entrepreneurs Eric Becker and Avy Stein, it is described by WealthManagement.com as leveraging multi-family-office services and alternative-investment capabilities to recruit advisors who work with high-net-worth families. "Cresset's family office approach closely aligns with how we have always believed wealth should be managed — with a comprehensive, long-term perspective that extends well beyond investment management," Ventrice said in a statement. Bober, in the same announcement, called the move "an exciting next chapter" for the team and its clients, and neither statement spends a word on price.

Sixteen people carrying $4 billion works out to $250 million a head, a proxy rather than a measurement — the coverage names six advisors and says nothing about what the other ten do. Even as a proxy it says the group is built like a practice with specialists in it, not a rainmaker and an assistant, and it suggests the institutional and succession side of the book is what will determine whether the whole $4 billion arrives intact. That work is also the least market-dependent revenue in the practice, which argues the fee base here is broader than a private-client book of the same size.

Cresset's own publicity stayed short. Chief executive Susie Cranston, the former First Republic executive promoted to the job in March, said she was "thrilled to expand our presence in South Florida to Boca Raton," and the coverage describes the office as the firm's first in the city, with the team's long-standing local relationships as the reason it exists. Set that beside the rest of Cresset's map — Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, New York, two separate additions in San Francisco — and the hiring looks like the assembly of a national footprint in the towns where the money lives.

Cranston's first months in the job have been loud. In July the firm hired Chris Tiano and Nick Smith as managing directors and wealth advisors in Los Angeles and New York; both had been directors at Lazard Wealth for about two years, overseeing $1.1 billion. The same month brought an advisor managing $600 million from Manchester Capital Management, a hire InvestmentNews's headline tied to Cresset's Santa Barbara footprint. Add this week's team and the announcements the coverage records since March come to $5.7 billion in team assets — an accounting of what has been reported publicly, not a complete count of what has been hired.

The cadence is older than her tenure. In February, Cresset brought over Heather Pelant as a managing director in San Francisco, where she had been managing a $2 billion book at Baker Street Advisors. In 2024 it added a San Francisco team from J.P. Morgan Wealth Management that had built a $5 billion book. The five additions the coverage records since early 2024 sum to $12.7 billion in announced assets, and the reporting cannot even settle the firm's particulars: AdvisorHub files Cresset in Chicago, WealthManagement.com calls it a New York-based multi-family office, InvestmentNews calls it independent and client- and employee-owned, and its client assets come in above $250 billion by one account and above $260 billion by another. The recruiting is the one thing everyone agrees on.

The recruiting market is the honest part of this business, because a group with $4 billion of ultra-high-net-worth relationships can go anywhere and its principals know what each suitor is worth. When a team chooses a nine-year-old family office over the wirehouse that housed it for 11 years, that is a verdict on the destination as a place to run a practice for the next decade. Read that way, Cresset's recent hires are the most useful pricing data available on what a family-office platform is worth to the people who would have to live inside it.

The loss lands on a bruising ledger. UBS lost at least 27 teams managing $28 billion in the first six months of this year, according to an AdvisorHub tally, with the defectors going to RBC Wealth Management, Rockefeller Global Family Office and Morgan Stanley, among others. That list is worth a second look, because it does not point one way — one of the three named destinations carries the family-office label in its own name. Banks are losing private-wealth teams both to each other and to firms built on a different architecture, which is a harder problem to answer with a recruiting offer.

Measured against the $915.8 billion in client assets UBS Financial Services reports in regulatory filings, the $28 billion is about 3% of the base. The percentage is the wrong lens. AdvisorHub describes the unit the BV Group left as UBS Wealth Management USA's private wealth arm serving ultra-rich clients, and each of the 27 departing teams took out a piece of the tier most likely to compound for a generation. A firm can absorb a 3% drawdown in aggregate assets; it cannot replenish the relationships that sit at the top of the market on the same timetable.

UBS has been buying too. Earlier this month it recruited a team managing $300 million from Morgan Stanley — less than a tenth of what left for Cresset this week — and platform data records two further exits in the same stretch, a team to Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network on Aug. 23 and an advisor to Raymond James & Associates on Aug. 21. In Florida, the firm restructured its market in May as veteran manager Lane Strumlauf stepped down, recruited J.P. Morgan Advisors manager Rick Penafiel, who is based in Boca Raton, to run a new South Florida market, and named Tyler Hutchens to lead its Greater Florida market. Three months later, a $4 billion private-wealth team walked out of Boca Raton. The coverage draws no line between the restructuring and the departure, and none is available from the material; what the reporting does establish is that the new South Florida market head works out of the town the assets left.

Here is the call, and it is about architecture more than money. Cresset will not outbid UBS for a $4 billion team on a transition package; a nine-year-old firm reporting a quarter of a trillion dollars in client assets does not carry a wirehouse's balance sheet, and it does not have to. What it sells a group like the BV Group is a P&L where a foundation mandate, an endowment mandate and a business-succession engagement are billed as revenue instead of referred out, plus an ownership structure — InvestmentNews describes Cresset as client- and employee-owned — that a team selling a business can read as equity. The banks have spent a decade building alternative-investment platforms and family-office service menus, and the constraint that remains is the model underneath: price the managed dollar, then assemble everything else around it. Teams whose clients have outgrown that arithmetic keep leaving, and the private-wealth tier of every bank-owned brokerage is where the queue forms.

The risk runs both ways, and it is public. A firm that has absorbed this much talent in 18 months carries an integration load that press releases do not measure, and the coverage says nothing about the terms on which arriving teams are wired into the platform or how long they stay. Recruiting runs are graded in year three, not on announcement day.

The testable part of this one is the practice mix. If the foundation and endowment mandates and the succession work move on the same calendar as the families, Cresset bought a business at a price that assumes one; if those relationships lag, it bought a $4 billion book. The other number worth watching is UBS's second-half tally against the 27 teams and $28 billion of the first, and whether the next private-wealth team out the door leaves a market the firm reorganized in May or one it has never touched.