CI Financial Corp. has acquired two U.S.-based registered investment advisors (RIAs) with combined assets under management of $8.1 billion. The move comes a couple of months after closing on two other acquisitions.
The Toronto-based firm announced the transactions on Thursday with its second-quarter results.
Effective July 31, CI’s Miami-based wealth management firm Corient completed the acquisitions of Emerald Multi-Family Office in Weston, Fla., with $7 billion in assets, and Byron Financial LLC in Charlotte, N.C., with $1.1 billion in assets. Both firms serve ultra-high-net-worth clients.
On May 31, Corient completed the acquisitions of Paragon Advisors Inc. in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a multi-family office with $4.4 billion in assets, and Socius Family Office LLC in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which manages $1.3 billion in assets and specializes in serving professional football and basketball players.
With the four acquisitions, CI added $13.8 billion in assets to its U.S. wealth management business, which at the end of the second quarter had $234.1 billion in assets.
Corient borrowed $154 million from CI Financial primarily to finance the four acquisitions, said Amit Muni, CI Financial’s chief financial officer (CFO), in a conference call to announced the quarterly results. For its part, CI Financial sourced the borrowed funds from its credit facility with its Canadian bank lenders.
Each of the acquired firms has been rebranded and integrated into the Corient platform, CI said.
The firm also said that last month it hired Francisco Tobias, a 20-year veteran with Citigroup, to be CFO of Corient.
Between late 2019 and 2022, CI made more than 30 deals, either directly or indirectly, to acquire U.S. RIA firms as part of its broader corporate strategy to grow its U.S. business. Last year, acquisition activity slowed.
In August 2023, CI announced it was rebranding its U.S. CI Private Wealth business as Corient, a name that originated from one of the RIAs that CI Financial acquired in 2022.
CI Financial reported total assets surpassing $500 billion in July, which included its asset management, Canadian wealth management, Canadian custody and U.S. wealth management businesses.
At the end of the second quarter, assets under management (AUM), for the asset management business, were $130.1 billion.
CI posted net redemptions of $332 million in its Canadian retail asset management business in the second quarter, an improvement from the $1.3 billion in net redemptions from the first quarter but down from the $7 million in net inflows in the same quarter last year.
The firm’s Canadian wealth management assets were $95.6 billion at the end of the second quarter, up from $93.8 billion in the previous quarter and $82.6 billion at the end of the same quarter the year before.
CI reported net income of $176.4 million in the second quarter, up from a net loss of $154.4 million in the first quarter. Total net revenues were $986.0 million in the second quarter, up from $645.7 million in the first quarter. Total expenses were $754.7 million, down from $768.3 million from in the first quarter.
Excluding non-operating items, adjusted net income was $135.6 million in the second quarter, up from $132.8 million in the first quarter; adjusted total net revenue was $731.3 million, up from $698.6 million in the first quarter; and adjusted total expenses were $507.9 million, up from $470.3 in the previous quarter.
CI’s total debt at the end of the first quarter stood at $3.6 billion, essentially unchanged from the previous quarter.
The firm also declared a quarterly dividend of $0.20 per share.