Pitcairn, a Conshohocken, Pa.-headquartered family office and trust company, has acquired Brightside Partners, a Baltimore-based registered investment advisor with $2.5 billion in assets under advisement. This represents Pitcairn’s first acquisition in its 102-year history, bringing its total AUA to $9 billion.
At the same time, the firm has launched a new registered investment advisor entity, Pitcairn Wealth Advisors, with plans to move the vast majority of its assets to it over the course of this year. The RIA will use Fidelity as its primary custodian.
Brightside Partners will shutter its RIA and come under Pitcairn’s ADV. Brightside’s five team members, including partners Pace Kessenich, Ryan Pollard and Justin Bakewell, have joined as W-2 employees.
Pitcairn President and CEO Andrew Busser said his firm has no interest in taking private equity capital or going public. The firm also does not want to become an RIA roll-up or aggregator. However, the Brightside acquisition presented an opportunity to expand Pitcairn’s alternative investments platform, with Brightside having relationships with more than 100 asset managers and research partners across venture capital, private equity, private credit and real estate asset classes.
“With Brightside, we saw a great opportunity to add to our alternatives platform to make it basically the gold standard in family office alternatives investing,” Busser said. “Now we have all these relationships with fund managers and research partners and all kinds of funds. While we had good research and access before, now it’s world-class.”
Pitcairn was founded in 1923 as a single-family office by the sons of industrialist John Pitcairn Jr. In 1987, it launched a trust company that began inviting other families to share in its investments. The firm now serves 140 families across the country through that trust company. The Pitcairn family accounts for about 5% of its assets today.
Busser said the firm launched the RIA because of how much it has grown.
“Being a state-chartered trust company is just too small a regulatory structure for a national firm, and we’ve become a national firm because clients from all over the country have sought us out,” he said. “It’s important for us and for clients that we be SEC-regulated, be nationally regulated and have the best regulatory structure to be a successful national firm.”
Pitcairn will keep the Pennsylvania-chartered trust company, allowing the firm to continue serving as trustee on several hundred trusts.
The company may make other acquisitions in the RIA space, but it will be selective, Busser said.
“We’ll look at acquisition opportunities that make great sense for clients,” he said. “But very affirmatively, we are not going to engage in the kind of roll-up strategies that are very popular these days. For us, the most important thing is client experience and culture, and we don’t want to grow so fast that we would sacrifice either of those things.”
“We have no exit plan of any kind as a firm, so we would not want to acquire anybody looking for that payday,” he said.
