Case Study — Wealth Management / M&A Integration
Two wealth management firms merging needed their client-facing teams integrated without triggering the advisor and client attrition that mergers of this type typically produce.
The Transformation Framework™
The two firms held fundamentally different views of client ownership — one treated the named advisor as sole contact indefinitely, the other rotated coverage across a team. Neither firm had surfaced the difference before the deal closed.
The disagreement was really about compensation, since advisor pay at both firms was tied to conflicting ownership models. Nobody wanted to raise a compensation question during an integration meant to be about client experience.
We separated the two issues explicitly, addressing compensation as its own negotiation track rather than letting it surface indirectly through coverage disputes — letting client-facing integration proceed on its own timeline.
A unified coverage model was piloted with a subset of shared clients before full rollout. Compensation harmonisation ran the full 13 months, deliberately paced to avoid a single disruptive change to advisor pay.
Client attrition during integration ran at 3%, against an internal pre-deal estimate of 8-10% for mergers of this type. Advisor attrition was zero among the firm's top-quartile relationship holders.
Measured Outcomes
Reflection
"Nobody wanted to talk about compensation. So it kept showing up disguised as a client service disagreement instead."
David Lindqvist — Head of M&A IntegrationEngagement team
Head of M&A Integration
Principal, Wealth Management
Senior Consultant