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Bluespring Wealth Partners, the Austin, Texas-based registered investment advisor arm of Kestra Holdings, has acquired Plymouth, Mass.-based SHP Financial, adding $2.3 billion in assets under management and expanding its presence in New England.
The acquisition brings to Bluespring’s W-2 model a 50-person team, including seven producing advisors and 18 financial services professionals, across three Massachusetts offices. SHP will keep its full team intact through the deal, along with its brand name, as a Bluespring partner firm.
SHP was founded in 2003 by Derek Gregoire, Matthew Peck and Keith Ellis Jr., who started their careers together in the insurance industry before shifting to run an employee-owned RIA. The firm custodies with Fidelity Investments’ NFS and serves mass-affluent and high-net-worth clients with financial planning services, including its proprietary retirement road map program.
“While we had the infrastructure to continue to grow as we are now, we wanted to expand,” said SHP Financial co-founder and Partner Peck. “In order to achieve our vision of bringing the ‘SHP Way’ to the Northeast, we wanted to partner with a firm that provides us the instant infrastructure, know-how and network to make that happen.”
Peck said the firm began looking for a partner with M&A advisory Turkey Hill Management about 12 months ago and was “turned off” by RIAs using an integration model. Instead, they looked for a buyer who would let them keep an operating model they had honed through “trial and error.”
“The integration model offered by others meant, to us, that we would be following someone else’s lead when we wanted to be the leader,” he said. “We appreciated Bluespring’s early recognition of our potential and their willingness to support us, instead of interfering with our vision.”
The deal is Bluespring Wealth Partners’ largest by assets since its founding in 2019, according to prior announcements, and the largest under President Pradeep Jayaraman, who took the top job in 2024 after leaving Focus Financial Partners. It also puts the firm on a strong pace to match or exceed its 2025 total asset additions of $6 billion, which included some teams affiliated with broker/dealer Kestra Financial.
“SHP is a team that has already built meaningful scale and is still hungry to grow,” Jayaraman said in a statement. “That’s what makes this an acceleration story, as opposed to a transition story.”
