RFG pairs two Louisiana RIAs into a $750 million practice

RFG Advisory's quiet acquisition-and-liftout playbook has produced its second capital-solutions combination of 2026, merging WFA's nearly 30-year Louisiana practice with the female-founded Volare Wealth Advisors into a firm holding roughly $750 million in client assets. The newly unified WFA Volare operates as a 16-person team under RFG's Birmingham, Alabama platform, landing amid what the firm calls the strongest recruiting stretch in its history.

The deal lands in a market that closed the first half of 2026 with 225 RIA transactions involving firms of at least $100 million in assets, the strongest six-month M&A stretch on record and nearly 40% higher than the same period in 2025. The Louisiana combination follows RFG's first advisor majority acquisition, completed earlier this year with RVA Wealth Management, a retirement-focused Richmond, Virginia practice holding more than $320 million in assets. Through June, RFG says it brought in over $1.5 billion in recruited client assets, its strongest six-month total on record.

Beneath the two-firm tuck-in is a block-trade model RFG has been running deliberately: this publication has argued that the independent breakaway is now a block trade, and RFG is running that playbook by acquiring majority stakes in established firms and pairing them operationally instead of waiting for solo breakaways. RFG's growth is coming not from custody or payout grids but from a capital-solutions arm that can write checks and then stitch firms together, and the first half of 2026 reads as the year that thesis became a recruiting line.

The partners describe the WFA Volare rationale as improvement rather than scale, and Dany Martin, partner and wealth advisor at the combined firm, put it directly: "This was never about getting bigger. It was about getting better for our clients." That culture-first language is standard vocabulary for two-family deals, but the underlying density points the other way: a $750-million practice spread across 16 people works out to roughly $47 million in client assets per employee, suggesting two books built on recurring planning relationships rather than breakaway one-offs. The client mix runs from retirees and high-earning professionals to elite athletes, with Chase Crump—identified as Louisiana's only NFLPA Registered Financial Advisor—and Brandon Wilson, a former NFL player whose background shapes the firm's work with professional and college athletes in the NIL era. Matthew Johnson has also joined as a wealth advisor and is opening a New Roads office that extends the firm's reach across Southern Louisiana.

Volare founder Chris Wedell remains a partner and advisor at WFA Volare, with women-focused planning a stated pillar of the combined firm. "Being a female-founded firm has always been an important part of who we are and how we've built Volare," she said. If RFG's first-half recruiting pace holds, the platform is adding roughly $250 million a month in recruited assets, a clip that suggests capital is assembling a national practice out of regional books.

Buy a majority stake in a respected firm, fold in a neighboring book with a complementary specialty, and let the niches reinforce one another: Volare's women-and-transitions focus sits alongside NFLPA credentials and an NFL alum who works with college athletes in the NIL era. RFG's first-half recruiting pace implies roughly $250 million a month, and that flow now runs through a capital-solutions arm that has already stitched two Louisiana books into one.