A weekly update on issues important to the Investment Management industry
A recent Schwab survey asked RIA principals to rank their firm’s top priorities in the coming year. We were disappointed but not surprised to discover that developing a succession plan was dead last. If you’re a founding partner or selling principal, you have a lot of exit options, and it’s never too soon to start thinking about succession planning. We’ll outline these options in this post and expound upon them in more detail later in the series.
As banks of all sizes seek new ways to differentiate themselves in a competitive market, we see many banks contemplating the acquisition of an existing asset management firm as a way to expand and diversify the range of services they can offer to clients. Transaction structures between banks and asset managers can be complicated, often including deal term nuances and clauses that have significant impact on fair value. Asset management firms are unique entities with value attributed to a number of different metrics (assets under management, management fee revenue, realized fee margin, etc.). It is important to understand how the characteristics of the asset management industry, in general, and those attributable to a specific firm, influence the values of the assets acquired in these transactions.
Schwab recently released its 2019 RIA Benchmarking Study. The survey contains responses from over 1,300 RIAs that custody their assets at Schwab to questions about firm operating performance, strategy, and practice management. The survey is a great resource for RIA principals to see how their firm’s performance and direction measure up against the average firm. We’ve highlighted some of the key results from the study in this week’s post.
Recent press in the RIA industry has continued to highlight the current M&A environment. For this post, we’ll discuss some of the top acquisition headlines making news in the investment management industry.
We were intrigued (and skeptical) of the recent reports that RIA aggregator Mercer Advisors was looking to fetch a $700 million-plus price tag in a prospective sale by its PE backers at Genstar Capital. A 15-16x multiple on an estimated pro-forma, run-rate EBITDA of approximately $50 million results in a $750 million to $800 million enterprise value for the business, which certainly got our attention. Still, this figure could be meaningless if it’s an unlikely appraisal of Mercer Advisor’s current market value. For this week’s post, we’ll address our opinion from a fair market value and strategic value perspective.
It’s been a year since the Focus Financial IPO generated a similar level of conversation in the RIA community – and the transaction dominos have been falling ever since. In that same year, Victory Capital pulled off a major acquisition, Affiliated Managers Group got back into the acquisition game following a two-year hiatus, United Capital was acquired by Goldman Sachs, and Mercer Advisors is soliciting bids.
I was thinking about all of this on a road trip across the southeast last week, in-between blasting Tom Petty on satellite radio and dropping in on a few clients. At one of my first stops, a client asked if I saw a lot of M&A activity in the RIA space. Yes, I replied, but I see even more headlines about it. Plenty has changed in the RIA community in the last twelve months, but even more has not.
Through the first half of 2019, asset and wealth manager M&A has kept pace with 2018, which was the busiest year for sector M&A over the last decade. M&A activity in the back half of 2019 is poised to continue at a rapid pace, as business fundamentals and consolidation pressures continue to drive deal activity. Several trends, which have driven the uptick in sector M&A in recent years, have continued into 2019, including increasing activity by RIA aggregators and rising cost pressures.
Trust law has evolved over time, most recently with modern trust laws in the 1980s and 90s established by certain states such as Delaware, Nevada, and South Dakota. Other states, such as Tennessee, have developed compelling trust statutes in more recent years. Just as trust law has changed with the regulatory environment, trust companies are changing to meet clients’ evolving needs.
The primary danger of an unsolicited offer is that it lures potential sellers into thinking the deal is done and the process will be easy. As with most things in life, if something looks too good to be true, it usually is.
Broad market indices generally increased over the last quarter, and publicly traded asset and wealth manager stocks followed suit.
Publicly traded traditional asset and wealth managers ended the quarter up 6.2%, beating out the S&P 500, which rose 2.6%. Alt managers were the bright spot in the sector, up nearly 18%. Aggregators and multi-boutique model firms did not fare well, despite all the hype about consolidation pressures in the industry and the high-profile deals in the aggregator space. These businesses ended the quarter down more than 14%.
On June 10th, Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions and Merchant Investment Management announced a new partnership to increase wealth managers’ access to capital for acquisitions and growth initiates. The deal opens up a sizable new sales channel for Merchant, and in return, Fidelity’s behemoth platform tacks on a few additional selling points to entice M&A-minded RIAs.
Significant underperformance relative to both the market and growth alternatives has led to continued outflows from institutional investors, which in turn has hampered AUM, revenue, and earnings growth despite relatively favorable market conditions. Since the multiple has also slid for these businesses, it appears that the market is anticipating more of the same. Against this backdrop, we address this post’s original question as to whether or not value managers are indeed undervalued at the moment.
On paper, the RIA model is a value generating machine: a reliable stream of distributable cash flow resulting from sticky, recurring revenues and growing effortlessly with the investment returns available in a diversifiable variety of financial markets. The reality, of course, is more nuanced.
While it’s no secret that the last year has been especially challenging for the RIA industry, Affiliated Managers Group (AMG) and Focus Financial (FOCS) have underperformed most of their peers by a fairly significant margin in the last few months. AMG is down nearly 50% over the last year, and Focus has lost over 50% of its value since peaking last September. For this post, we’ll offer our take on the driving forces behind this decline.
If there is one consistent story in these RIA rollups, it’s that building them takes longer than anybody expects. Duran worked on building United Capital for nearly 15 years. Some things require scale that cannot be acquired in one lifetime, however, and that’s where the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, saw an opportunity.
Much of the sector’s recent press has focused on the current M&A environment as well as practice management issues for RIA firms, so we’ve highlighted some of the more salient pieces on these topics and a few others that are making news in the investment management industry.
During Q1 2019, most classes of RIA stocks underperformed the market despite its relatively sharp increase through the first three months. Investors still seemed concerned about the RIA industry’s prospects in the face of fee compression and continued asset outflows. RIAs are responding to this pressure in different ways. Some are actively expanding product offerings to meet clients’ changing demands; others are staying true to the traditional RIA model and responding to revenue pressure by developing cost efficiencies. As we do every quarter, we take a look at some of the earnings commentary of investment management pacesetters to gain further insight into the challenges and opportunities developing in the industry.
Over the weekend, the Financial Times published an article touting the rising level of merger and acquisition activity in the U.S. wealth management industry. The piece echoed much of the typical commentary on the RIA industry’s prospects for deal activity: a large, profitable, but fragmented community of firms needing scale to develop the necessary technology infrastructure and serve sophisticated client needs. The article talked to leaders in several PE-backed consolidators and some M&A specialists in the space, all of whom talked their book in general agreement that valuations were strong and consolidation was on. What the article didn’t address is that while private equity has indeed been actively pursuing the investment management industry, the public markets seem to have lost interest.
Ordinarily, we’d expect investment manager stocks to outperform the S&P in a stock market rally. This isn’t always the case though. So far this year, most classes of RIA stocks have underperformed the market despite its relatively sharp increase through the first three months. The explanation isn’t necessarily obvious.
Several trends which have driven the uptick in sector M&A in recent years have continued into 2019, including increasing activity by RIA aggregators and rising cost pressures. Total deal count during the first quarter of 2019 was flat compared to the same period in 2018, while deal count was up 35% for the twelve months ending March 31, 2019, compared to the comparative period ending March 31, 2018. Reported deal value during the first quarter of 2019 was down significantly, although the quarterly data tends to be lumpy and many deals have undisclosed pricing.
While market declines are a threat to the profitability and valuations of any asset management firm, active managers face the additional threat of relative underperformance driving outflows, even in periods of rising markets. Low fee passive strategies have become increasingly popular due in part to both the perceived underperformance of active managers and an increasing focus on fees. But to what extent have active fund outflows been driven by mediocre performance versus competition from passive strategies, and what is the impact on asset management firm valuations?
Last week, Matt Crow, Brooks Hamner, Taryn Burgess, and Zach Milam attended the 2019 CFA Institute Wealth Management Conference in Fort Lauderdale. We didn’t get a total headcount, but attendance appeared to be up from last year’s event. There are probably a number of explanations for this, but perhaps the most plausible was the interest in this year’s focus on the psychological side of wealth management, which explored behavioral finance tendencies and how emotional decision-making can impact investment performance. For this post, we’ve elected to summarize some of these presentations and their implications for financial advisors.
As difficult it is to imagine a valuable car such as the Ferrari 250GT SWB being forgotten, what we see more commonly are forgotten buy-sell agreements, collecting dust in desk drawers. Unfortunately, these contracts often turn into liabilities, instead of assets, once they are exhumed, as the words on the page frequently commit the signatories to obligations long forgotten. So we encourage our clients to review their buy-sell agreements regularly, and have compiled some of our observations about how to do so in the whitepaper. We hope this will be helpful to you.
CFA Institute Wealth Management 2019 happens April 1-3 in Fort Lauderdale. The Investment Management Industry team of Mercer Capital will be there.
