OnePoint and Modern are buying channels, not Florida

OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners has now brought three teams over from Northwestern Mutual since February, which is a more useful fact about the firm than the $400 million of Tampa client assets that arrived with the most recent one. InvestmentNews reported this week that OnePoint added Bast Financial Group, a seven-person practice led by founder Rebecca Bast, while Modern Wealth Management acquired Jacksonville's Sanchez Wealth Management Group and the nearly $710 million it oversees. Between them, about $1.1 billion of Florida client assets changed institutional homes in the same week.

Bast began her career in 1994 and spent nearly 30 years registered with Northwestern Mutual, according to her BrokerCheck record, building a practice around multigenerational wealth transfer for business owners and executives. She is joined by advisors Parveen Hall, Daniel George, Taylor McCullough, Elena Madrazo and Jonathan Clifford, and client service associate Jamie Hayes. In the announcement she framed the move the way independents always do, citing an independent firm's flexibility alongside the resources and technology of a larger platform, and chief executive Andy Schwartz said the two firms share a view of where financial advice should begin.

OnePoint is the Parsippany, New Jersey-based manager formerly known as Bleakley Financial Group, backed by Rise Growth Partners, the privately held strategic minority investor founded by Joe Duran. It reports more than $18 billion in advisory assets nationwide, and Bast's team is the third it has added this year whose members came from Northwestern Mutual, after Voyage Wealth Architects in February and Armstrong & Sinoff Financial in April.

InvestmentNews called Florida, figuratively and literally, one of the hottest wealth markets in the country, and the week's pair of announcements is evidence for the claim. What the two moves have most in common sits upstream of the geography: Bast's practice lived inside a mutual insurer for three decades; Sanchez's lived inside a broker-dealer for a quarter-century, and neither arrived through a solo breakaway. Both arrived as practices, staff, clients and service model intact, the shape of deal that now defines the talent war.

Three teams from one institution in eight months is not something a firm stumbles into. Whatever it rests on — reputation, recruiting capacity, a network of former colleagues — OnePoint has built a source, and in a market where capital for acquisitions is abundant and largely undifferentiated, a reliable way to find sellers is the harder thing to assemble. Nothing in the announcement speaks to price or to how the introductions were made.

Modern Wealth's move is larger and more conventionally structured: the Monterey, California-based manager acquired Sanchez Wealth Management Group, whose founder Christen "Chris" Sanchez has run the Jacksonville practice for more than 25 years and had been registered with LPL since 2000, according to his BrokerCheck record with FINRA. He comes with his sister, wealth advisor Dawn Nicoles, wealth advisor Josh Mandelkorn, client service associates Alexandria Sanchez and Lindsey Hall, and director of operations Jennifer Koeller.

Modern had $10.9 billion in regulatory assets, 30,617 accounts, 253 employees and 40 registered representatives as of early September; the Sanchez purchase is the fifth acquisition the firm has announced in 2026 and the third it has sourced from LPL's platform in five months. As this publication noted when the deal surfaced, Modern's regulatory assets sit roughly $4 billion below the total it announces, a gap that most likely reflects the lag between signing and conversion rather than anything about the quality of the books it buys.

The two books are built differently, and the difference is worth pricing: Sanchez's nearly $710 million sits behind three advisors, close to $237 million apiece, while Bast's roughly $400 million spreads across five named advisors and its founder, nearer $67 million each. The Jacksonville figure suggests fewer, larger relationships of the sort that move cleanly in a single transaction; the Tampa practice's business-owner succession work suggests depth spread across more hands. Both are books buyers say they want, and they will not integrate the same way.

Modern's stated constraint has been absorption rather than sourcing, so the composition of what it buys matters as much as the headcount. Three advisors carrying $710 million is a book that probably folds onto a platform quickly; it also leaves fewer relationships to deepen once it is there. OnePoint's addition runs the opposite risk, a practice whose value is spread across a team that has to be kept. Rise Growth-backed managers have spent the season buying retention capacity in various forms — Grimes brought tax preparation in house this month — and buying the team rather than only the book is OnePoint's version of that bet.

The tests ahead are specific. OnePoint has to show that a fourth Northwestern Mutual team follows the first three. Modern has to show that the LPL books it keeps acquiring keep converting onto its platform. Neither question has much to do with Florida.