Wealth adviser in quest for consolidation buys Trivest

TORONTO Independent wealth adviser Wellington-altus is buying Trivest Wealth Counsel Ltd., a Calgary-based investment management firm, with plans to establish a beachhead for consolidation of the market segment in which it operates.

Winnipeg-based Wellington-altus, which has $8.5 billion in assets under administration, has already established itself as a consolidator in a larger segment of the wealth management market overseen by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada. This has included picking up teams and their books of business from some of the country’s largest banks. The smaller segment Trivest belongs to — investment counsel portfolio managers, or ICPMS — are provincially regulated.

Investment counsellor and portfolio managers with firms such as Trivest are also typically the business owners, and they have a fiduciary duty to clients.

“The needs of both of the types of adviser are starting to become the same,” said Shaun Hauser, president of Wellington-altus.

Both need support services as they face growing demands to be transparent and offer more financial planning and wealth management, he said. “We can offer a repository of services that both sides … can plug into and deliver clients the same needed wealth advice,” Hauser said. “That’s where we see it going.”

Martin Pelletier, Trivest’s co-founder, will become managing director of the new business line, Wellington-altus Private Counsel.

He said his sector is facing pressures including more costly and time-consuming regulation. At the same time, the explosive growth of low-cost ETFS is creating demand to expand into in-depth financial counselling and advice.

The problem for many independent investment counsellors and portfolio managers is that the time spent on back-office demands “leaves little time available to undertake the introduction of such additional services,” said Pelletier, who also writes a regular column for the Financial Post.

He and his partner have been looking to team up with another organization for a while because of those pressures, he said. Among the appealing things about the Wellington-altus arrangement, he said, is that the model will allow any portfolio managers who come on board to continue to own their “practice,” while accessing additional resources to handle back office and support services.