SEIA builds a tax unit and rents its family office layer
The $32.6 billion Los Angeles adviser has hired an LPL tax executive to run a new division, while buying in family governance and fiduciary accounting through Baker Tilly.
Signature Estate & Investment Advisors, a Los Angeles-based registered investment adviser with $32.6 billion under management, said on 10 August 2026 that it had created a tax practice and taken on a partner for its family office work. Both moves point at the same ambition, which is to serve wealthier and more complicated households, and the firm is assembling the capability from two directions at once.
The new unit, SEIA Tax Services, will be run by Tim Gacsy as director of tax services. Gacsy spent more than seven years at LPL Financial overseeing tax and cost-basis functions across a network of more than 21,000 independent advisers, and most recently worked as an in-house accountant at Elite Resource Team, a consultancy for advisers and accountants. SEIA describes the unit as combining its existing planning method with technology-driven tax analysis, beginning with a full review of a client’s tax return rather than treating tax as a year-end exercise.
“Income tax provides one of the clearest windows into a client’s overall financial picture,” Gacsy said in the announcement.
Buying in the family office layer
The second move is a partnership with Baker Tilly Family Office rather than a hire or an acquisition. Through it, qualifying high net worth and ultra-high net worth clients get access to family governance, trust and fiduciary accounting, and advisory support on multigenerational transfers, business sales and other liquidity events. Baker Tilly says its family office group has more than 150 practitioners and works with over 300 family offices.
Brad Repinsky, who leads estate, tax and financial planning at SEIA, framed the expansion around how rarely a wealthy client’s problem sits inside one discipline. Selling a company, passing wealth down or absorbing a sudden change in net worth touches tax, structure, governance and reporting at the same time. The firm also said it was refreshing its brand and had redesigned its website.
Why it matters
For families comparing advisers, the shape of the announcement is more informative than the announcement itself. Tax was brought in-house under a named leader. Family governance and fiduciary accounting were rented from an accountancy firm. That split is a fair guide to where SEIA expects steady volume and where it expects occasional, specialist demand.
It also invites questions worth putting to any adviser making a similar claim. Who does the work in practice, the firm or its partner? Who keeps the relationship if the partnership ends? On tax, is the adviser preparing returns, advising on them, or simply reading them earlier than before? SEIA’s own description spans consulting, planning and preparation, which is a wide brief for a new unit.
The direction is not unusual. Ocorian’s survey of 200 family offices, published a week earlier, found 77 per cent expect to lean more on third-party specialists over the next three years, with capability rather than cost the main driver.
SEIA has been hiring quickly. Matt Matrisian joined as president from AssetMark in 2025, Repinsky arrived from Fidelity, and a technology operations head started in June. Matrisian told InvestmentNews last November that he wanted the firm at $100 billion by 2030, partly through mergers with businesses running $8 billion to $10 billion. Tax and family office services are, among other things, a way of making SEIA more attractive to the advisers it hopes to absorb.
Sources: WealthManagement.com, InvestmentNews, Baker Tilly.
