Modera Wealth Adds $750 Million Newport Beach Firm in First West Coast Expansion

Modera Wealth Management’s entry into Southern California adds a $750 million advisory business and a local team to a firm that already serves clients across the country. The purchase of Newport Beach-based RS Crum gives Modera its first West Coast office and extends a run of smaller additions this year.

RS Crum oversees approximately $750 million in assets under management and serves more than 250 households. Founded in 1976, it was among the first fee-only financial planning practices in the country. Its nine-person team is joining Modera, including certified financial planners Mark Rylance, Jon Theriault and Daniel Sexton, who will become wealth managers and principals.

For RS Crum, the fit turns on maintaining the practice’s approach as it joins a larger organization. “RS Crum has been in business for 50 years, and we felt a real responsibility to find a partner who will keep doing things the way we always have: providing fee-only advice with a personal touch and a boutique feel,” Rylance said.

Modera Chief Executive Tom Orecchio said the firm already works with clients in the area. Establishing an office there gives those relationships a local base and brings RS Crum’s staff and client service into Modera’s wider operation. The practical test will be whether the incoming team can retain the personal service it values while drawing on the resources of a national firm.

A larger California step after two smaller additions

The RS Crum purchase follows two additions Modera made over the summer. In June, the Westwood, New Jersey-based firm agreed to add Plantation, Florida-based Northstar Financial Planners, which brought $311.6 million in assets. The Northstar deal expanded Modera’s presence in Florida.

In August, Modera added Marathon Wealth Management of Albany, New York, bringing approximately $155 million in assets and an entry into the Capital Region and Long Island. Those additions were smaller than RS Crum by reported assets, making the California transaction a more substantial step in the firm’s geographic expansion.

Modera reported $20 billion in assets under advisement as of Sept. 30. That measure provides a broader picture of the firm’s reach than RS Crum’s assets under management, so the figures describe different pools of assets and should not be treated as directly comparable. For clients and employees joining through the purchase, the scale of Modera’s existing business may bring more centralized resources; the experience will depend on how the firm integrates operations while maintaining local relationships.

Integration as a stated acquisition strategy

Modera has described its approach as integration, with planning and a shared investment philosophy at the center. Vince Curtin, who was brought in to lead acquisitions in August 2025, has emphasized that distinction from firms focused on building a large operating platform. “We are very specifically an integrator. We’re not just building a platform,” he told InvestmentNews last year. “We lead with planning and we have a similar investment philosophy, which is evidence-based investing.”

That approach may matter to an established practice such as RS Crum, whose leadership says it wants to preserve a boutique feel. The acquisition will test how well a firm can bring in new teams and locations while keeping the client experience consistent with the identity those teams built. Modera’s acquisition chief has discussed the firm’s integration approach in more detail.

The transaction also gives RS Crum’s staff access to Mira, Modera’s proprietary AI system, which the firm introduced in October. Modera developed the platform over two years with technology partner OnTrade and has used it across the business since July. Mira is designed to use software agents for multistep work, rather than only responding to individual prompts.

Modera says Mira can bring client data and documents together in a household-level system of record, helping incoming practices consolidate information onto a common system. The firm has also said that each agent is limited to data it has been instructed to review and that actions require human approval. Those controls and the quality of the underlying data will shape how useful the system is in day-to-day client work. The company’s president, Joe McCuine, has argued that an integrated system may appeal to firms that have seen limited benefit from adopting separate AI tools. Other advisory firms are also exploring how AI tools fit together.

Scale in a crowded advisory market

Modera’s measured expansion comes as advisory-firm deal activity remains high. Echelon Partners counted 125 transactions in the third quarter and projected 510 deals for 2026. Excluding transactions above $20 billion, the average seller in that period managed $1.7 billion, more than twice RS Crum’s reported assets. The comparison places the California purchase among deals involving smaller sellers, even as it represents a meaningful regional step for Modera.

Founded in 1983, Modera serves more than 6,300 clients and is majority owned by its employee shareholders. Its next challenge is converting geographic reach and shared systems into a durable operating fit for each incoming team. For RS Crum’s households, the clearest measure will be whether the people and planning style they chose remain in place as the firm becomes part of a larger organization.