Vardhan Wealth Management is Summit Financial’s first affiliate office in Michigan.
A UBS breakaway team has formed an independent wealth management firm in Farmington Hills, Mich. with backing from Summit Financial.
Vardhan Wealth Management is led by founder Monish Verma (pictured), who spent 12 years at UBS as senior vice president of wealth management and 14 years before that at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney as vice president of investments. Joining him at Vardhan are Renee Wahl as director of operations and Kory Frost as director of planning and strategy. The group had a book of $375m at UBS, according to Summit.
The name ‘Vardhan’ is derived from Sanskrit words meaning ‘bestower of wealth.’
Vardhan Wealth Management has taken an investment from Summit through the RIA’s custom capital division Summit Growth Partners, launched late last year alongside Merchant Investment Management, a backer of Summit Financial.
Summit Growth Partners takes ownership positions of 10%, 15% or 20%. Upon closing, the selling firms receive cash, as well as equity in Summit Growth Partners based on their contribution to the division’s overall revenue.
Vardhan is the 14th firm Summit Growth Partners has bought a piece of, following its investment in April into Kandor Global, an internationally-focused RIA in Miami with $450m in assets, according to Summit.
Vardhan is Summit’s first affiliate office in Michigan.
Ed Friedman, Summit’s director of business development and growth, said the $3.4bn Parsippany, N.J.-based RIA is looking to shed its east coast concentration and go national through its investment division with several additional deals this year.
‘Based on advisors and firms that we’re talking to, when we look at Summit at the end of the year it will be a more national footprint and not necessarily as regionally focused as it might have been in the past,’ he said.
In addition to selling a stake to Summit Growth Partners, Vardhan has affiliated with Summit’s breakaway platform SummitVantage, which handles middle- and back-office functions like HR, tech and compliance.