Corient Acquires UHNW-Focused $21B Summit Trail Advisors
Corient announced another blockbuster registered investment advisor acquisition on Wednesday.
The Miami-based RIA owned by Mubadala Investment Company said it reached a deal to acquire Summit Trail Advisors, a New York-based RIA overseeing $21 billion in client assets, with a focus on ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families, as well as some institutional business. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
New York-based Summit Trail launched in 2015 with the Dynasty Financial Partners Network when a group of former Barclays advisors left to form their own RIA. Senior team leaders, led by co-founder and Managing Partner Jack Peterson, will become partners in Corient as part of the move, with the firm adopting the Corient brand name.
“Corient was the clear choice for our firm and, most importantly our clients,” Petersen said in a statement. “What drew us to Corient was its partnership model—the only one of its kind in wealth management—and the collaboration it fosters across the organization.”
In addition to its assets and client base, Summit Trail will bring Corient expertise in outsourced family office and chief investment officer services, working across wealth, estate planning and investment management in public and private markets and a team-based approach that aligns with Corient’s model, according to the announcement. It will also establish a footprint in several U.S. markets, including New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle.
A spokesperson for Dynasty said the firm will continue to support Summit Trail per its initial agreement with the RIA, which included financing, according to prior statements.
“The decision by a firm of Summit Trail’s caliber to join Corient serves as meaningful validation of our firm’s quality and the differentiated value of our private partnership structure and business model,” said Kurt MacAlpine, founding partner and CEO of Corient, in a statement.
MacAlpine has previously touted Corient’s private partnership model, which mirrors that of other professional services firms and now includes 300 partners and over 2,700 employees. Corient stemmed from the rebranding of the U.S. wealth business of Toronto-based CI Financial, which has wealth and asset management businesses in Canada. CI Financial was taken private in 2025 by Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Capital.
After a series of larger acquisitions in the U.S. and the U.K., Corient is now among the largest RIAs in the world with about $556 billion in assets under management and administration.
Corient’s most recent deal was a July acquisition of Seven Bridges Advisors, a New York-based RIA with $4.9 billion in assets under management. The month before, it announced it had completed a deal to acquire two U.K.-based advisory firms overseeing a combined $175 billion in assets, a deal the RIA had been working on since September 2025.
Summit Trail itself had been an acquisitive firm as a Dynasty RIA. In 2024, it added a $3 billion team from BMO Financial Group.
The RIA had a brief executive shuffle last year, when Jeff Ringdahl took over as president and chief operating officer for a few months before jumping to Raymond James. At the time, he posted on LinkedIn that the role with Summit “wasn’t the right long-term fit for me.”
Ardea Partners was the financial advisor on the Summit Trail deal, and Seward & Kissel LLP was its legal counsel. Goldman Sachs was Corient’s financial advisor, and Sidley Austin LLP was its legal counsel.
