Canadian Wealth Manager Pursues Heat in L.A.

0

The firm is still called Bel Air Investment Advisors, and it’s still based in Century City. But the private wealth management firm is now owned by a Canadian company that hopes to use Bel Air to start building its presence in the United States.

Montreal’s publicly traded Fiera Capital Corp. this month bought Bel Air, which manages $7.3 billion in assets for ultrahigh-net-worth clients. Fiera at the same time announced that it had purchased a smaller New York investment manager.

Fiera will pay about $115 million in cash and an additional $10 million in stock to Bel Air’s 11 partners, all of whom plan to stay with the company.

Sylvain Brosseau, Fiera’s president, said his 10-year-old firm wanted to expand to the United States to take advantage of what he sees as a growing wealth management market. Fiera had been looking for potential acquisitions in the Northeast, California, Texas and Florida.

Fiera has a private wealth management operation in Canada, but Brosseau said it would have been difficult to grow that operation in the United States without buying a company here. Wealth management firms have deep and often long-term relationships with wealthy families, making organic growth a slow process.

Fiera settled on Bel Air, he said, because it had a good management team as well as a strong regional brand.

“You need to find local leaders, local influencers who have developed strong networks,” Brosseau said. “Bel Air has done a good job finding and servicing the right clients. There’s a lot of value there.”

Bel Air manages money for 275 families, most of them in California. The firm only accepts clients with $20 million or more in investable assets.

In addition to its name, the firm will keep all of its 48 employees, operating as part of Fiera’s North American private wealth management division. Todd Morgan, Bel Air’s senior managing director, will lead the division, which will include the New York operation, as chairman.

Morgan said Bel Air had rejected a handful of buyout offers over the past few years but opted earlier this year to consider a sale because the wealth management business is primed for big growth in the next few years and Bel Air needed a partner with deep pockets to finance an expansion.

“There’s a lot of money that had been locked up in fixed income and cash that is coming loose now,” he said. “I think we’re leaving a dormant period and we’re going to see growth again. I want a partner to do it with.”

Already, Morgan has plans to expand the one-office firm. Within the next year, he said he plans to hire managers to drum up clients in Pasadena, Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco.

“That’s the low-hanging fruit,” he said. “We have some exposure in those areas, but not as much as I’d like. Wealthy families are undercovered in California.”

Within the next two or three years, he said he’d like to open Bel Air offices in San Diego, San Francisco and Texas.

Stationery Sale

Westwood private equity firm Brentwood Associates last week sold its majority stake in stationery retailer Paper Source, a Chicago chain that has grown from 21 stores to 73 since Brentwood’s initial investment in 2007.

Brentwood sold to Bahrain investment firm Investcorp. Terms were not disclosed.

Sales slowed during the recession at Paper Source, which sells invitations, notebooks and high-end paper products. But Steven Moore, a Brentwood partner, said it proved a good investment because the chain has loyal customers who returned quickly as the economy improved.

Customer loyalty is big for Brentwood, which has investments that include vegetarian restaurant chain Veggie Grill, gym operator Spectrum Clubs Inc. and Taco Bell franchisee group K-Mac Holdings Corp. Those companies, Moore said, are similar in that they have products that customers not only buy, but also want to promote, whether that’s Paper Source’s whimsical rubber stamps or Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos.

“At the end of the day, we’re focused on a certain level of customer loyalty, engagement, passion around a brand,” Moore said. “We’re looking for things where, for whatever reason, a customer engages with a brand and decides they love it and that they want to become a brand promoter.”


C-Suite News

Andy Oropeza has joined factoring firm Bibby Financial Services as vice president of business development for California. He is in the firm’s Westlake Village office and was formerly with the local office of Miami factor Summar Financial.

Staff reporter James Rufus Koren can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 225.

No posts to display