Canadian wealth manager hangs on to its asset-management platform business. Loring Ward International (LWI), a New York-based, Canadian-domiciled wealth-management company, has sold Loring Ward Capital Management, its private-client business, to focus on Loring Ward Advisor Services, its turnkey asset-management platform provider.

"[Loring Ward] Capital Management has been an important component of our portfolio of businesses for many years, but now we will focus completely on building and managing Loring Ward Advisor Services," says LWI's CEO Robert Herrmann.

Over the next five years LWI says it stands to earn as much as $6,875,000 from the sale.

Prescient, sort of

The buyer, Woodland Hills, Calif.-based Monarch Wealth Advisory Group, is newly formed RIA controlled by Jeffrey Wheeler, formerly director of wealth planning at Lording Ward Capital Management in Los Angeles.

"Jeff has tremendous professional skills and experience, as well as the confidence of clients," says Herrmann.

About 18 months ago LWI said it was in talks "with certain senior managers of its business management units, who have expressed interest in acquiring their respective business-management practices."

At the same time though, LWI said it had "received an unsolicited, nonbinding expression of interest to acquire" Loring Ward Capital Management and Loring Ward Advisor Services. And in an apparently connected move it combined those business units in a new entity called Loring Ward Asset Management & Advisory Services.

Loring Ward Capital Management, which provides wealth-management services mainly to clients of the business-management LWI sold in 2006, has about 170 clients and around $320 million in assets under management.

Loring Ward Advisor Services -- the turnkey asset-management business that LWI is holding on to -- has 676 advisor relationships who have more than 20,000 customers and about $5.1 billion in assets. In addition to providing investment products and strategies it offers back-office processing, education, training, and business-development support to investment advisors and their clients. -FWR

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