Captrust Financial Advisors, the $1 trillion registered investment advisor based in Raleigh, N.C., has hired a new head of mergers and acquisitions after about a year of searching.
Mike Wunderli, a former managing director of investment bank Echelon Partners, will take over as head of M&A in a new position that oversees dealmaking across Captrust’s individual wealth management and institutional plan advice businesses.
“The M&A space is strong, and this role is covering more of the landscape,” said Fielding Miller, co-founder, CEO and chairman of the board for Captrust. “We took our time to find the right person with the right experience—and we got our man in Mike.”
Captrust makes the move more than a year after its former M&A head, Rush Benton, left to start his own advisory firm, Gorman Jones. It also comes after another Captrust M&A lead, David Wahlen, left in January to become the head of M&A for Merit Financial Advisors.
Fielding pointed to Wunderli’s experience working with the sell side of the industry and raising capital as traits that will help Captrust recruit and acquire in a competitive market.
“The real opportunity here is that this wealth management industry, which is a cottage industry of very small players, is coming together for various reasons,” he said. “These are predictable, solid, growing businesses that can be pulled together in a thoughtful way—that is why the momentum is so high.”
Wunderli had been a managing director at Echelon Partners since 2016, overseeing M&A activities across the wealth and asset management industries. Before that role, he spent 12 years at Lehman Brothers and UBS as a senior vice president in the private wealth division.
He said Captrust was one of the few jobs in the market that he would have left his former employer to join. Part of that draw, he said, was its track record of successfully integrating RIAs into the firm.
“The first thing that jumped out at me when I visited the big tower in Raleigh was the integration team,” Wunderli said. “It is expansive, it is extensive and it is so well-organized. That immediately spoke to me.”
The former M&A consultant said some large RIAs “know how to integrate, and some don’t.”
“The integration is very difficult, especially when you are doing acquisitions,” he said. “This next phase of the independent space will be a few very strong firms leading the way and defining the next chapter.”
Captrust was co-founded by Miller more than 27 years ago, focusing on employer-sponsored retirement plan advice. In 2006, it started an aggressive M&A strategy that led to about 81 deals and a wealth management practice with $245 billion in assets under management and more than $1 trillion in total assets. It received its first capital backing from GTCR in 2020, which was joined by minority investor the Carlyle Group in 2023.
Fielding also said that Wunderli’s expanded role reflects Captrust’s market position as a firm that can manage the convergence between retirement plan assets and wealth management.
“We get a lot of clients referred to us from our corporate institutional clients,” he said. “Having the ability to service both is important and a unique advantage that we have.”