Lynnfield, Mass.-based RIA firm F.L.Putnam Investment Management Company said today that that it had recruited a $1 billion AUM team in Wisconsin formerly affiliated with F/m Investments and 1251 Capital Group.
The six-member advisor group is known as the Red Granite team. It’s F.L. Putnam’s first footprint in Wisconsin, and an expansion of its Midwest presence. It’s the firm’s largest deal to date, and the acquisition will boost F.L. Putnam’s overseen assets to $12 billion.
Red Granite is led by co-chief investment officers Joel D. Vrabel and David J. Drzadinski. The two have overseen a large-cap growth equity strategy since 1996, and F.L.Putnam said the acquisition will build out its proprietary equity investment platform. The team will continue working from their office in downtown Milwaukee.
The deal comes shortly after T. Rowe Price announced plans to buy the team’s former firm, F/m Investments, also a 1251 Capital Group affiliate. F/m is a fixed-income and ETF specialty manager with $19 billion in assets under management. T. Rowe Price announced the deal on August 20.
This is F.L. Putnam’s third acquisition this year. In July, the firm said it had acquired Seascape Capital Management, an independent RIA in Portsmouth, N.H., with $500 million in assets under management. In April, it announced that it had bought Arcadia Investment Management Corporation, a $670 million AUM firm based in Kalamazoo, Mich.
“At FLP, we have built a firm where talented advisory and investment teams can expand their capabilities, access the resources of a larger organization, and continue to deliver highly personalized advice to their clients,” said Tom Manning, F.L.Putnam’s CEO. “The addition of Joel, David, and their team establishes our first presence in Wisconsin and our second location in the Midwest, while adding a differentiated large-cap equity strategy to our investment platform.”
The firm said that the Red Granite team uses a fundamental, bottom-up approach for its portfolio investments, and aims to outperform the Russell 1000 Growth Index with lower risk and volatility.
“Tom and his team have built a premier investment platform with tremendous depth and expertise that will allow us to build on what we have created over the past 30 years and deliver even more value to our clients,” Vrabel said.
Drzadinski added, “Joining FLP gives us the opportunity to bring our large-cap equity strategy to a broader platform while continuing to focus on the work and client relationships that have driven our success for the past three decades.”
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.