Mercer Global Advisors, one of the nation’s largest and most acquisitive registered investment advisors with $71 billion in assets, has acquired Full Sail Capital, an Oklahoma City RIA with about $2 billion in client assets. Full Sail represents Mercer’s third-largest deal to date and its sixth acquisition this year.
This is Mercer’s second acquisition in Oklahoma, bringing its total AUM in Texas and Oklahoma to more than $7 billion.
“Oklahoma City is one of the most vibrant and fast-growing cities in the country, and there’s probably no more vibrant a team here certainly than the Full Sail team than perhaps anywhere,” said Daniel Gourvitch, president of Mercer Advisors.
“When you’re going into a new market, establishing a presence with a well-known firm is actually a very good strategy because then so much can expand from there—both on the organic growth and inorganic growth side,” said Martine Lellis, principal of M&A partner development at Mercer. “I think there will be people interested in the fact that we’ve partnered with this firm. It may unlock other opportunities in Oklahoma City and beyond because there will be a very established team that those firms could actually join. Mercer can make that process more seamless.”
Full Sail was founded in 2018 by founders David Stanley, Scott Cravens and Zac Reynolds, who came out of Trust Company of Oklahoma to launch the RIA. They had no assets at the time but have quickly scaled to serve more than 600 families in the area.
“We’ve prided ourselves on building a boutique family office firm,” said Cravens, chief operating officer of Full Sail. “That’s the way we saw ourselves when we were founded 7 1/2 years ago, and it’s the way we saw ourselves when we decided to find a partner.”
Cravens said his firm decided to seek a partner because they felt it would be better to find a company that had already built the in-house resources correctly. They interviewed some 15 firms across industry models and found that Mercer’s integration makeup was the best fit.
“We saw lots of opportunity and structure out there, for us the right fit was to integrate and do a single team to move forward into the next chapter both for Oklahoma City and hopefully for Mercer Advisors,” he said. “As we came to know them, it was very obvious that, as I said, they were essentially Full Sail Capital but at scale.”
Mercer has some 350 advisors on its platform, but 450 specialists who can help those advisors with tax and estate planning, specialized planning resources, etc.
“Trying to take it to that next level—where you’re really integrating everything and providing all the solutions in-house—gets really challenging at the inflection point they’re at,” Lellis said.
Over the last nine years, Mercer has solidified its place as one of the most active acquirers in the industry, using its “integration—not aggregation—model” to attract potential partners. The firm recently announced it had surpassed 100 deals since launching its M&A strategy in 2016, with the acquisitions of Tufton Capital Management, a $810 million AUM RIA in Hunt Valley, Md., and Lewis Wealth Management, a Denver-based RIA with about $75 million in AUM.
Mercer is majority owned by Oak Hill Capital, Genstar Capital, Altas Partners and GIC, a global institutional investor.
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