Fiera Capital and Sceptre Investment Counsel, two Canadian wealth management firms, are merging this summer to create Fiera Sceptre in a bid to ramp up their service to high net worth clients, as previously announced.

The combined companies want to bolster the high net worth business by coming up with more alternative investment funds for Canadians with significant assets to invest in, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

With Sceptre's suite of traditional mutual-fund products, Fiera "can be creative in the field of alternative products," the publication quoted Jean-Guy Desjardins as saying. He is controlling shareholder of Fiera Capital and will be the chairman, chief executive and chief investment officer of the merged company.

The story highlights how wealth management continues to be a vibrant M&A market as firms seek to expand market share, exploiting sometimes discounted valuations of target companies, or because they need to bulk up to cope with rising regulatory costs in the wake of the financial crisis.

The combined firm, Fiera Sceptre, can look into more hedge funds, infrastructure, private equity, real estate and other non-traditional investment vehicles that weren't previously accessible to high net-worth clients, said Desjardins.

Fiera Capital and Sceptre Investment Counsel, which announced their merger in mid-June, are forming an investment-management company with about C$30 billion in assets. Roughly 76 per cent of that is now held by Fiera Capital.

Both Fiera Capital and Sceptre's assets are currently largely tied to institutional clients. Fiera Capital, based in Montreal, has 40 per cent of its assets coming from retail and high net worth investors. Sceptre, based in Toronto, has only 17 per cent of its assets coming from non-institutional clients, the publication said.