Merit bought a succession plan and paid for it in equity

Tim Brennan has left Pinnacle Financial Group, the Commonwealth Financial Network practice he co-founded and ran for nearly 27 years, and taken its book to Merit Financial Advisors: roughly $888 million in client assets and more than 1,000 households, all of it staying in a Deerfield, Ill. office that Merit says will not move. The hire lands as Merit's 11th partnership of 2026 and 62nd acquisition overall, a cadence that keeps the Atlanta RIA in the same conversations as the larger recruiters it bids against for Commonwealth teams.

The transaction's importance is geographic, whether Merit is $30.1 billion or the $23.9 billion its regulatory assets showed in mid-September. Merit opened a Chicago office last year through its acquisition of Blueprint Wealth Advisors, and Brennan's Deerfield practice sits on the metro's northern edge, where Wahlen, the firm's executive vice president for strategic partners, says Merit wants to keep building. The move carries a second piece: a $57 million Wisconsin practice and an office in the Fond du Lac/Oshkosh region where Brennan has kept a presence for more than 15 years.

Pinnacle survives the split, continuing under co-founder Jim Santos, so a 27-year partnership loses one of its principals rather than shutting down. Brennan, 37 years into the business by his own count, describes the move as appetite rather than exit: he still loves the work, still wants to grow, and was drawn to a firm building something. He takes equity in Merit through the transaction.

Two second-generation advisors moved with him, and Wahlen says they can now grow their careers; his read is that Brennan wants to spend more time developing that team and less time running a business. A book built almost entirely on referrals is a wasting asset when bought for cash alone. Bought with equity, paired with two named successors and a buyer that has absorbed the parts of running a firm the founding advisor says he wants less of, it becomes a multi-decade revenue stream. Merit paid in ownership for a succession plan. The other firms bidding for Commonwealth teams should note which one won.

Merit's language matters as much as its checkbook. It frames these transactions as partnerships; the 11 counted in 2026 and the 62 overall are two names for the same event, a framing that only holds because sellers take equity. Brennan did, and Wahlen's pitch leans on culture, collaboration and what he calls healthy competition, which is easier to sell when the incoming advisor has a stake in how the relationship ends.

Brennan spoke with the Blueprint team while weighing the decision, a step Wahlen calls common among the Commonwealth teams that have joined Merit since LPL Financial acquired the independent broker/dealer last year. LPL lifted its run-rate cash flow target for Commonwealth by $25 million and projected retention would climb to 90%, as this publication reported in August. Every advisor who leaves is a line against that projection, and this one carries $888 million.

Merit is not alone on the Commonwealth roster; Cetera, Kestra Holdings and Osaic are named as competitors for the same advisors, and the flow has not slowed. A four-person, $160 million Annapolis practice left in August, which is why this publication described the Commonwealth diaspora as still flowing. Commonwealth's own book runs to $212.7 billion in regulatory assets across 615,215 accounts, and this year's departures include a $684 million move in early September, $420 million in mid-August and $352 million on September 10, all smaller than Brennan's.

The premium in wealth-management M&A has moved from the client list to the gatekeeper, with buyers paying for distribution seats and integration operators rather than books. Merit's Chicago sequence reads like that thesis at metro scale: one office inherited from the Blueprint deal, a second team now in the northern suburbs, and a strategic-partners executive describing an ongoing build. What Merit bought here is a market position in Chicago, with Brennan's clients as the entry fee.

The reference network Wahlen describes, Commonwealth teams calling the Blueprint office before they call Merit, is the one to test. If the coming Chicago-area departures land in Deerfield, LPL's 90% projection will need a footnote, and Merit will have shown that an equity stake and a next-generation career path travel further than a recruiting check. The next Commonwealth practice to go shopping in the northern suburbs will say which currency it prefers.