Wealth management consolidation: should I stay or should I go?

On 28 July, Corient agreed to buy Seven Bridges Advisors, a New York multi-family office with about $4.9 billion under management. If the name Corient keeps appearing, that is because the firm has announced a deal roughly once a month this year. The pattern behind it, and what it means for the families on the client list, is worth setting out plainly.

How Corient got this big

Corient did not grow the slow way. It was assembled out of CI Financial’s US wealth arm, CI Private Wealth, through a rapid run of registered investment adviser purchases that began in 2020. The business took the Corient name in August 2023. In August 2025, CI Financial itself was taken private by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital in a deal that valued CI’s equity at roughly C$4.7 billion and the whole business at about C$12.1 billion, according to CI Financial and WealthManagement.com.

With institutional capital behind it, the pace picked up. In 2026 alone Corient has added, among others, the advisory business of Palo Alto Wealth Advisors in January; Chicago’s Vivaldi Capital ($5.6 billion); Geneva-based Bedrock Group (CHF 8.4 billion, about $10.7 billion, with offices in London, Monaco and Lisbon); Tulsa’s Capital Advisors ($7.8 billion); Letus Private Office in France; and, at the end of May, it completed its acquisitions of Stonehage Fleming and Stanhope Capital, pushing global assets past $500 billion, per InvestmentNews and Family Wealth Report. The firm now reports more than 300 partners, over 2,700 employees and roughly $535 billion in client assets as of 30 June.

A whole sector doing the same thing

Corient is the loudest example, not the only one. Adviser M&A has broken records two years running. DeVoe & Company counted 322 RIA transactions in 2025 and Echelon Partners put the figure at 340, both highs; the first half of 2026 then produced 225 deals involving firms with at least $100 million in assets, up nearly 40 per cent on the same period last year, according to InvestmentNews and Echelon Partners. Private equity is the engine: sponsor-backed buyers made up about 85 per cent of strategic acquisitions in the first half of 2026.

The reasons are not sinister. A boutique is a small business with the same problems as any other: a founder who wants to retire, a technology bill that keeps rising, compliance costs that do not scale down, and clients asking for private-markets access a small team cannot easily source. Selling to a larger platform solves several of those at once. Nobody has to renege on anything for the maths to point one way.

What the family actually bought, and sold

Here is the part principals tend to miss, and it is the point Amin Naj makes well in a recent Net Worth essay. Families left the private banks for boutiques precisely to escape scale: to be seen whole rather than as a segment, and to get advice that was not shaped by what an institution needed to distribute. Now those boutiques are being absorbed by the kind of institution the original promise was defined against. The family can end up back where it started, having changed provider once and paid for it.

When a firm changes hands, what is being valued is not the furniture. It is the client relationships and how hard they would be to unwind. As Naj puts it, the buyer is pricing the family’s stickiness. The reporting lives in the firm’s system, the entity reasoning sits in its people’s heads, and the record of what was decided and why is scattered across its files. A family with genuine doubts about the new owner often stays anyway, because leaving means rebuilding a decade of institutional memory it never held a copy of.

So, stay or go?

The honest answer is that switching is usually not the fix. The instinct, when your firm is absorbed, is to find another boutique: smaller, more independent, not yet on anyone’s list. It is the same move as last time, with the same expiry date, because the next firm is also a business that will one day need capital and succession.

That does not make consolidation bad for families. Scale can buy better systems, deeper research and access a small shop cannot fund alone, and Corient’s private partnership model is a real attempt to keep advisers aligned with clients rather than with a distributor. Families will judge that over years, not from a press release. But the benefits are the firm’s to give, and incentives move when ownership moves: service models get standardised and pricing gets reviewed, and the family did not set those terms.

The useful response is not choosing a better firm but keeping a few things outside any firm at all. In practice that means the family holding its own mandate (what the wealth is for and, above all, who decides), its own consolidated data rather than a login to someone’s portal, the judgment about which advice to follow, and its own record of past decisions. Hold the coordination between advisers in-house and the rest tends to stay put.

A blunt test settles it: if your main firm were acquired tomorrow, what would you walk out with, in your own systems, readable by someone who was never there? Whatever that list is, that is the part of the family office you own. The rest you are renting, and this year has been a long lesson in how quickly a landlord can change.