EP Wealth Advisors, which grew to $31 billion in assets under management last year, has kicked off 2025 by closing its first acquisition in Tennessee with $500 million registered investment advisor Criterion Capital Advisors.
Criterion Capital co-founder Allan Horner leads the five-person team at the independent, Nashville-based RIA, which includes partners Mark Pierce and Scott Freeman. The firm, founded in 2005, offers financial planning, investing and tax planning.
Ryan Parker, CEO of EP Wealth, said the RIA fit with the firm’s strategy to bring in fee-only advisors interested in continued organic growth through close work with existing and new clients.
“The three primary partners and advisors came out to Salt Lake City, and we immediately saw a business fit, a philosophy fit and a cultural fit around how to serve clients,” Parker said, referring to the city where he is based. “They also wanted to do what a lot of our partners want to do, which is maintain a local, boutique feel for their clients.”
Parker said EP Wealth was introduced to the firm by Rush Benton, who retired in 2024 as Captrust's head of mergers and acquisitions to start his own investment bank in Nashville, Gorman Jones.
While Parker said talent, not geography, is the driving force behind EP Wealth’s acquisitions, the company has further expanded its footprint in the Southeast, which includes offices in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.
“We’re excited to be part of EP to both potentially expand our breadth of services and provide deeper partnerships,” Criterion’s Horner said in a statement.
EP Wealth did not disclose the terms of the deal, which closed in January. It was the second major deal in the Music City announced this week. On Monday, another serial acquirer, Mercer Global Advisors, announced that it had closed a deal with a $660 million RIA in the Nashville metro area—also its first in that location.
Torrance, Calif.-based EP Wealth undertook an acquisition binge in 2024 with seven deals that boosted AUM by roughly $10 billion from its $21.4 billion in client assets as of the end of 2023. That growth included the firm closing its largest Midwest acquisition to date in December, a Michigan-based RIA with about $1.6 billion in client assets.
Parker said the firm’s growth plans for 2025 are similar to those in 2024 and, in some ways, going back to 2017, when Wealth Partners Capital Group first took a stake in the firm and started to assist with its M&A. That strategy is to keep “the long game in mind” for a firm still majority-owned and controlled by management and its co-founders, Derek Holman and Brian Parker, and has 90 employees with equity stakes.
Private equity funding is also helping EP Wealth’s growth, with Berkshire Partners taking a minority stake in 2020.
“We’re an aggressive growth company, but that’s mostly born out of the fact that we see tens of thousands of people who need fee-based financial planning,” Parker said. “We are spending money right now on technology and infrastructure—there are too many business school case studies that show that if your growth outstrips your supply lines and you weren’t taking care of the people that got you there, it won’t be sustainable.”
To build those services, Parker said the firm is focused on three areas: executing at a high level in core areas of tax planning, estate planning, trust services, investments and operations; leveraging technology to improve and bring more personalization to the client experience; and continuing to add and cultivate advisor talent.
To that final point, he notes that the firm hired its first-ever people officer, Megan Glover, last year and brought on former SageView Advisory Group executive Jorge Bernal as chief operating officer.
“What is underappreciated right now is winning the war for talent,” Parker said. “If you don’t have great people across the board, you are not going to be able to sustain the growth rates that people feel is possible.”
