Cerity Partners, a $156 billion New York-based registered investment advisor, has made a play to combine its wealth management and institutional investment consulting and advisory services in a merger with Verus Investments, which oversees client assets of about $1.2 trillion. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close at the end of the first quarter of this year.
Verus, based in Seattle, offers consulting and outsourced chief investment officer services to institutions, including nonprofits, corporations, and public and multi-employer retirement plans. The firm is employee-owned, with less than 5% of the stake held by senior leadership, including CEO Jeffery Maclean, who has been in the position for over 32 years.
Verus will take on the Cerity name and bring national RIA research, technology and data, along with a staff of a little under 100, to work with institutional clients alongside its wealth and retirement plan businesses.
“This partnership meaningfully expands our leadership in the institutional space and strengthens our ability to serve clients of all sizes, complexities, and delegation preferences,” Cerity CEO Kurt Miscinski said in a statement.
Cerity, which is majority-owned by private equity firm Genstar Capital, has been an active acquirer in the wealth management sector. So far in 2026, it has already closed deals with RIAs managing a combined $4.6 billion in client assets.
It has also built its retirement plan focus to about $18 billion in nondiscretionary assets, according to its most recent Form ADV. It has done that partly through acquisition, such as a 2019 deal for retirement advisory Blue Prairie. In 2024, it also brought on Michael Barry from UBS to head its workplace solutions division—later promoting him to chief growth officer.
Fred Barstein, CEO and founder of The Retirement Adviser and Plan Sponsor Universities, said the move could find quick savings for Cerity by leveraging Verus’ investment consulting team for its own investment research and decisions. More broadly, he said the move can help Cerity bring institutional capabilities, including the trend toward private market and alternative investments, to its upper-high-net-worth retail clients.
“As private investments start moving in a big way, that’s an expertise that most wealth RIAs and certainly RPAs don’t have,” Barstein said. “It distinguishes them, because it’s one thing for a wealth client—for a Hightower or now a Cerity—to say they have that type of expertise, but it’s another to come in with a proven track record.”
Barstein, who is also an editorial contributor to Wealth Management, compared the deal to Hightower’s acquisition of institutional consultancy NEPC in late 2024. Through that deal, Hightower quickly grew to overseeing $1.8 trillion in assets under advisement and $258 billion in assets under management.
At the time, leadership of the firms stressed Hightower’s advantage in adding OCIO services, whereas NEPC cited the RIA distribution channel Hightower’s national footprint would provide.
Verus CEO MacLean also cited the “broader set of capabilities and expertise” that would come with combining with Cerity, while keeping its “personalized, fiduciary-driven guidance they rely upon, from the same professionals they have trusted for years.”
Houlihan Lokey is advising Verus on the deal.
Last year, Creative Planning made a move to vastly expand its retirement plan asset advice and oversight with the acquisition of then $250 billion SageView Advisory Group.
Barstein noted the thin margins that retirement plan advisors and advisories are operating in, which makes wealth management firms more capable of acquiring them, and working to both add plans by business-owning clients, and in the longer-run capture higher-net-worth wealth clients from those plans.
