Cetera Financial Group is acquiring Concourse Financial Group Securities, the dually registered broker/dealer and RIA arms of Protective Life Corp. The deal will net Cetera about 350 financial professionals, more than $12 billion in assets under administration and $4 billion in managed assets.
Cetera Holdings CEO Mike Durbin said the acquisition of the Birmingham, Ala.-based Concourse Financial represented “a tremendous opportunity” in a consolidating market and fits into Cetera’s history of acquiring and integrating IBDs originally affiliated with insurance companies.
“This transaction will enable us to strategically align the CFGS team within the existing Cetera Wealth Partners community while increasing Cetera’s scale and creating new opportunities for growth for CFGS advisors,” Durbin said.
According to Aaron Seurkamp, senior vice president and president of Protective’s Protection & Retirement Division, the acquisition allows his company to focus on its “core competencies” in the life insurance and annuity businesses. He said Protective made the deal based on previous Cetera acquisitions of similar companies.
Dentons LLP served as Cetera’s legal counsel, while Maynard Nexsen and Eversheds Sutherland were legal counsel for Protective and Concourse (Morgan Stanley served as the latter’s financial advisor in the deal). The transaction is expected to close in 2025’s first quarter.
The Concourse acquisition is Cetera’s latest carve out of the assets of an insurance company’s brokerage and advisory businesses.
In 2019, Cetera acquired the assets of Foresters Financial, bringing about 500 advisors into the firm (in doing so, the firm created Cetera Investors, a distinct division of the company’s self-clearing b/d). In 2021, Cetera agreed to acquire the assets within Voya Financial’s independent financial planning channel, bringing over about $37 billion in client assets and 900 independent financial professionals.
Last year, the firm purchased Securian Financial Group’s retail wealth business, bringing about $50 billion in assets over, according to Cetera. Securian would distribute its individual life and annuity products via Cetera’s affiliated professionals. In 2012, Cetera acquired Genworth Financial Investment Services, the b/d for the Genworth life insurance company. In 2013, MetLife sold its IBDs Walnut Street Securities and Tower Square Securities to Cetera.
Cetera includes 12,000 financial professionals and their teams, with more than $521 billion in AUA and $224 billion in AUM as of the end of June. In 2018, private equity firm Genstar took a majority stake in the company and reinvested fresh capital in the company in 2023, remaining the majority shareholder.
However, there have been changes in the executive level at several Cetera divisions in the past few months; in August, Todd MacKay, the former president of the tax-focused wealth firm Avantax that Cetera acquired last year, became president of Cetera Solutions, responsible for growth along business lines within the broader firm.
Meanwhile, Tom Taylor recently announced he would retire as Cetera Financial Group’s chief sales and growth officer by the end of the year. He’d been with the firm for nearly 30 years, and the company is currently searching for his replacement.
