SageView’s Upham to Lead Creative Planning Retirement
In the wake of Creative Planning’s deal to purchase the $250 billion SageView Advisory Group, the registered investment advisor is naming SageView President Jon Upham to lead the combined retirement solutions division.
Creative Planning’s acquisition of SageView will close in December, and the combined firms will have more than 550 advisors, 11,800 retirement plans and 80,000 private wealth clients, totaling $640 billion in assets. The deal is adding hundreds of billions in retirement plan assets to Creative Planning’s total.
According to Creative Planning founder and CEO Peter Mallouk, Upham “brings unparalleled expertise in shaping institutional retirement businesses.”
“Having started his career as an advisor himself, he offers a unique perspective on the needs of plan sponsors and how best to support and scale a growing retirement business,” Mallouk said. SageView has an outstanding reputation as a leader in the retirement plan consulting industry, and Jon’s leadership has been instrumental in building that reputation.”
Upham joined SageView in 1999, and since then, the firm has grown to 1,800 plan sponsor clients and $250 billion in assets under advisement and management. SageView was one of the industry’s original retirement plan advisor aggregators, alongside Captrust and what is now Hub.
In mid-September, WealthManagement.com first reported that Creative Planning would acquire SageView, which has been majority-owned by Aquiline Capital Partners, a financial services and tech-focused private equity firm, since early 2021. (Aquiline will exit its ownership of SageView with the acquisition.)
Since 2021, SageView sought to build wealth management capabilities alongside its retirement focus, including its acquisition earlier this year of CAP STRAT, an Illinois-based institutional retirement plan consulting and wealth management firm with $750 million in wealth assets and over $24 billion in institutional assets under administration.
Creative Planning has also expanded its retirement business in the years leading up to the SageView acquisition, including buying IRON Financial’s retirement division, Lockton’s $110 billion retirement plan business, and Mesirow’s corporate retirement advisory services business.
According to AdvizorPro data, SageView and Creative Planning are already among the most prominent players in the RIA space (SageView alone ranks second in the list of most retirement plan assets). With SageView’s approximately $226 billion and Creative Planning’s $71 billion, the combined firm will total over $297 billion in retirement assets (still firmly behind Captrust, which totals over $949 billion in retirement plan assets).
In an interview with WealthManagement.com, Mallouk said the SageView deal was vital to solidify Creative Planning’s spot in a sector where plan record keepers would likely work with only a few firms “at a very high and connected level.”
“Our thesis in the retirement space is that you’re going to end up with just a few players,” Mallouk said. “Those few firms are going to have to have tremendous specialization and expertise, they’re going to have to have negotiating power, access to the best investments, they have to be innovative, they have to have workplace solutions and they’ve got to have scale.”