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Company Details
Merit Financial Advisors ("Merit"), founded by Rick Kent, has grown into a nationally recognized financial advisory firm known for its client-centric approach and dedication to comprehensive financial planning. The firm’s story reflects its commitment to helping individuals, families, and businesses achieve financial success through personalized strategies and a holistic approach to wealth management.
Founding and History
Rick Kent founded Merit Financial Advisors with the vision of creating a firm that prioritizes meaningful client relationships and delivers tailored financial solutions. Since its inception, Merit has expanded significantly, managing over $10 billion in assets. Its growth has been driven by a combination of organic development and strategic acquisitions, enabling the firm to serve a diverse range of clients across the United States.
Merit’s foundation is built on a philosophy of trust, transparency, and excellence. The firm was established to address the complexities of modern financial planning, ensuring that clients receive coordinated advice that integrates all aspects of their financial lives.
Important Milestones
- Strategic Expansion: Over the years, Merit has grown its footprint nationwide through acquisitions and partnerships, increasing its ability to serve clients in various regions while maintaining personalized service.
- Client-Centric Innovations: The firm has continuously invested in technology and data-driven infrastructure to enhance the client experience, streamline operations, and provide advisors with advanced tools to deliver top-tier service
- Industry Leadership: Merit has been recognized within the financial services industry for its innovative practices, leadership, and commitment to excellence. This recognition highlights the firm’s ability to adapt to industry changes while maintaining a focus on clients’ evolving needs.
Merit Financial Advisors takes a holistic approach to wealth management, helping clients navigate their financial journeys with confidence. The firm describes its mission as partnering with clients to achieve their financial goals through comprehensive planning, strategic investing, and personalized guidance.
Core Services
- Wealth Management: Merit specializes in creating customized investment strategies that align with clients’ risk tolerance, time horizons, and financial objectives. The focus is on achieving long-term growth while managing risk effectively.
- Financial Planning: Advisors collaborate with clients to build tailored financial plans that address cash flow management, tax efficiency, retirement planning, and estate planning.
- Insurance Solutions: The firm provides a range of insurance services designed to protect clients’ financial health, including life insurance, disability coverage, and long-term care solutions.
- Retirement Planning: Merit works closely with individuals and businesses to ensure a secure retirement. Services include 401(k) plan management, pension planning, and strategies for maximizing retirement income.
- Business Owner Services: For business owners, Merit offers specialized services like succession planning, risk management, and employee benefits consulting.
Merit’s client-first approach means that every service is tailored to meet the specific goals and challenges of the individuals, families, and businesses it serves.
Merit generally follows an established investment management process with a long-term orientation. For most clients, the firm believes that a long-term diversified approach is the most suitable investment strategy. Merit focuses on building a collaborative and entrepreneurial environment, emphasizing relationships, team collaboration, constant improvement (Kaizen), and future focus. The firm offers a robust suite of investment options to meet the majority of advisors' preferences, ranging from passive to tactical strategies, including mutual funds, ETFs, individual equities, structured products, and alternative investments. Merit Financial Advisors offers several specialized strategies as part of their investment approach: Active Management, Passive Management, Direct Indexing, Tactical Strategies, and Hedge Fund or Private Equity Integration. These specialized strategies are designed to accommodate various advisor preferences and client needs, aligning with the firm's collaborative and flexible approach.
Understanding that each client is unique, Merit focuses on custom-tailoring investment portfolios and designing strategies that align with each client’s specific goals, ensuring that all interests are harmonized throughout the process. Under the leadership of Brian, its Chief Investment Officer, Merit has developed a comprehensive investment platform to meet the diverse preferences of advisors, ranging from passive to tactical strategies. These strategies include: Merit Select (ETF only for smaller accounts), Merit Core (active and ETF portfolios), Merit Core + (includes liquid alternatives) Merit Impact (absolute return, low volatility, alternative income and growth), Merit SMAs (direct indexing program), Merit Partner Program, Merit Structured Notes Program, Merit Advisor Guided (focused list of investments and leverage external custodial partners). The platform includes Mutual Funds, ETFs, and individual equities, as well as structured products and alternative investments. Additionally, Merit offers multiple TAMPs, some of which are white-labeled, to accommodate a wide range of client needs.
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Acquisition Model
Full Acquisition
Yes. For further information, please contact Alaris.
Yes
For further information, please contact Alaris.
For further information, please contact Alaris.
Mandatory Points of Alignment
Partners are asked to immediately adopt the Merit brand.
Advisors will be required to adopt Merit’s technology stack and centralized operations, with the transition occurring gradually after close.
Merit maintains a centralized P&L.
Merit does not require advisors to adopt its client experience.
Merit has practice management support that advisors are encouraged to utilize.
Merit's client-facing advisors can continue to manage their investments, but must centralize trading.
Advisor Value Proposition
Merit is committed to enhancing both the quality of life and business performance for its partners by fostering strong, deep relationships built on understanding their personal and professional goals, as well as those of their clients. The Merit team is highly collaborative, creating an environment where sharing knowledge and supporting one another is a key priority. With a continuous improvement mindset, Merit embraces a Kaizen philosophy, always striving to refine processes and deliver better results, knowing that nothing is ever truly "finished." Decision-making is always future-focused, ensuring that while Merit reflects on past successes and areas for growth, its sights remain firmly set on new opportunities and long-term goals. This dynamic approach ensures that partners not only grow their businesses but also enjoy a more fulfilling and balanced professional life.
Merit offers centralized financial planning services, ranging from basic paraplanning to specialized strategies that can be tailored to work closely with advisors.
Merit provides comprehensive operations support by offloading critical functions such as compliance, HR, trading, and billing, while offering integrated technology solutions to streamline and enhance overall efficiency for partners.
Merit offers a comprehensive range of services that go beyond financial planning and portfolio management. They provide estate planning through a partnership with Wealth.com, which scans and analyzes existing documents. For qualified and non-qualified plans, they use advanced tech tools for plan design and offer enrollment meetings to integrate with advisors. Merit has a dedicated business development team and plans to introduce a call center. Their corporate retirement plan department manages 401(k) plans, utilizing solutions like Brokerage Link and the Pontera tool. For tax services, Merit currently outsources CPA work but is transitioning to in-house tax preparation, with plans to offer white-label tax advisory by Q1 2025. Businesses with $2M or more in revenue will have tax prep costs covered by Merit. In investment banking, they provide a valuation tool for business owners and maintain strong relationships with banks in the Midwest and South. Merit also specializes in executive compensation planning, offering tailored solutions such as deferred compensation plans, defined benefit and contribution plans, individual planning, and ESOPs.
Merit supports organic growth by assigning a Client Development Manager to each region, who works directly with advisors focused on expanding their businesses. Additionally, the firm’s Chief Growth Officer, John Cote, is actively working to secure new custodial referral programs. The firm also offers 12 growth tracks, ranging from niche marketing strategies to broad Centers of Influence (COI) initiatives, all of which contribute to the firm’s consistent 10%+ organic growth.
Merit offers comprehensive practice management support, including defining roles and responsibilities for local offices, conducting employee reviews, identifying and implementing strategic growth initiatives, recommending workweek structure models, and helping partners define and manage their offices to achieve specific KPIs.
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