Cresset pursues National Advisors Trust deal to build a $13.1B trust platform

Cresset Capital Management is pursuing a combination with National Advisors Trust, a Leawood, Kan., firm that administers $7.7 billion in trust assets for independent advisors, institutions and families, that would move the New York multi-family office's $5.4 billion trust and services division onto NAT's platform and, by Cresset's arithmetic, create a $13.1 billion national trust business. The trust figures sum exactly to $13.1 billion, and the larger number in the room is the more than $250 billion in client assets Cresset already oversees, which makes this a play for capability rather than scale.

Cresset itself says only that it is "pursuing" the transaction, while WealthManagement.com reports the firm is nearing an acquisition; the on-record version frames completion as a condition rather than a fact. If it closes, a spokesperson wrote, Cresset will "become a client of NAT," even as it invests in the firm to keep growing NAT's external advisor client base and keeps pursuing acquisitions of its own. A buyer that ends up purchasing from the company it just bought is an unusual place to finish a deal, and it says which side of the table the platform sits on.

Because Cresset's trust and services division operates today under its own state charters, the deal's mechanics are migration: over time, the firm expects to move that business onto NAT's national trust charter, infrastructure, technology and trust capabilities "rather than maintaining two separate platforms." The stated gain is client access to trust services through a national charter rather than the state charters the division carries today, and collapsing two trust stacks into one reads as a cost argument as much as a client-services one.

Founded in 2001, NAT brings more than a charter: it runs Brand Advantage, a white-label program that lets advisors offer trust services under their own branding, and it partners with more than 340 wealth firms, 13,000 advisors and 17,000 families. In effect, NAT is an outsourced trust department for the independent advisory channel, and the client sees the advisor's brand rather than NAT's. Cresset says it will keep investing in NAT to grow that external advisor base, and will keep making acquisitions of its own.

Scale cuts the other way. The $13.1 billion platform is small next to the more than $250 billion in client assets Cresset oversees, so the transaction is not a wager on relative size but on a capability clients ask for at the point when a business owner's balance sheet has to become an estate plan. Cresset has spent years gathering those business-owner relationships across the wirehouse and RIA markets, and owning the trust operation keeps that work in-house rather than routed to a third party. Whether a shared utility stays a shared utility once one of its users owns it is a question the coverage does not take up.

The alternatives are already visible. Alvarez & Marsal Private Wealth Partners, the RIA launched by A&M Inc., created its own national trust company earlier this year, and in 2024 F.L.Putnam Investment Management acquired New Hampshire-chartered Darwin Trust Company to bolt a trust division onto its business. Cresset CEO Susie Cranston framed the NAT combination as an "expansion of national trust services for the independent RIA and family office sector, which has very much been needed."

Cresset's buildup has been steady: an aggressive acquirer of wealth practices across the wirehouse and RIA markets, it sells recruits on family-office structure ahead of payout, and that pitch pulled a 16-person UBS team into Boca Raton this year, which is why this publication has described the firm's approach as buying businesses rather than books. Trust is the institutional version of a conversation Cresset's Eric Becker has argued the industry handles badly, preparing assets for heirs while neglecting the heirs themselves, and a trust platform puts the firm inside that transfer rather than beside it.

The transaction fits a pattern that has shaped wealth management consolidation: a contest for integration capacity and distribution, in which gatekeepers have become the acquisitions. NAT is a gatekeeper in miniature, the firm 340 wealth practices already route trust work through, and Cresset is buying the rail rather than only the traffic on it. What the coverage does not say is what Cresset is paying, and no price appears in it; that is the detail that would settle whether the buyer valued a charter, a platform, or a client channel. The same asset base underwrites very differently depending on which one you pick.

The external base is the number to watch. If NAT's 340 firm partnerships and 13,000 advisors grow after closing, Cresset bought distribution with a charter attached; if they hold flat while Cresset's $5.4 billion book migrates onto the platform, it bought infrastructure. Either way the buyer will sit on the customer side of a business it owns, with a clear read on NAT's economics and an obvious incentive to change them.