Modera Wealth to buy $750M RS Crum

Modera Wealth Management said it agreed to acquire RS Crum, a fee-only planning firm in Newport Beach, Calif. with about $750 million in assets under management, InvestmentNews reported Nov. 4. The deal gives the Westwood, New Jersey-based firm its first West Coast office. Terms were not disclosed.

RS Crum's $750 million equals about 4% of the $17.7 billion in regulatory assets Modera listed in its Sept. 14 Form ADV, SEC filings show. The filing lists 238 employees and 21,420 accounts. Modera separately reports $20 billion in assets under advisement as of Sept. 30; the two figures use different measures and dates.

For RS Crum's more than 250 households, the nine-person team, including certified financial planners Mark Rylance, Jon Theriault and Daniel Sexton, moves to Modera as wealth managers and principals. That works out to roughly $3 million or less per household. Rylance said the firm, founded in 1976, wanted a partner that would keep the fee-only, boutique approach. Modera CEO Tom Orecchio said the firm already serves clients in Southern California, so the office puts a local base under existing relationships.

The deal follows two smaller acquisitions: Northstar Financial Planners in Plantation, Fla., which brought $311.6 million in June, and Marathon Wealth Management of Albany, N.Y., which added about $155 million in August. By the reported figures, the three deals total about $1.2 billion. Vince Curtin, who has led M&A at Modera since August 2025, told InvestmentNews last year, "We are very specifically an integrator. We're not just building a platform."

For owners of $500 million to $1 billion practices, RS Crum provides a recent precedent. Echelon Partners counted 125 RIA transactions in the third quarter and projects 510 for 2026. Excluding deals above $20 billion, the average seller in the quarter managed $1.7 billion, more than twice RS Crum's size.

The RS Crum announcement lists access to Mira, Modera's proprietary operating platform, among the benefits for the incoming team. Modera unveiled Mira in October as an agentic AI system built on software agents that carry out multistep tasks, developed over two years with technology partner OnTrade.