Are LPL and Osaic in the hunt for the old United Capital?

investmentnews.com:

With Goldman Sachs considering jettisoning the registered investment advisor business it bought just four years ago, two giant broker-dealer networks, LPL Financial and the recently rechristened Osaic, make intriguing potential buyers, one industry analyst said.

In 2019, Goldman acquired United Capital for $750 million and then renamed it Personal Financial Management. The RIA unit targets high-net-worth clients, but not the ultra-wealthy, who have accounts with $20 million to $50 million and are the typical target client for the giant investment bank.

The financial advisors who work with broker-dealers like LPL Financial and Osaic typically focus on clients who are characterized as mass affluent and have $500,000 to $1 million in money to invest.

The RIA unit has about $29 billion in client assets. A Goldman Sachs spokesperson on Monday confirmed toInvestmentNews in a statement that the bank was “currently evaluating alternatives” for its Personal Financial Management RIA business.

“Some articles have cited (LPL Financial, or LPLA, its ticker symbol) as a potential buyer of the asset, but have also indicated a PE-backed firm such as Advisor Group (now Osaic) may be the more likely acquirer,” Steven Chubak, managing director at Wolfe Research, wrote in a note Monday afternoon.

LPL is a mergers and acquisitions machine, and historically it has executed M&A deals in a price range of six to eight times EBITDA, or earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization, Chubak noted. EBITDA is a key metric in evaluating wealth management businesses, particularly RIAs, because of the steady revenues they generate each quarter from client fees.

Under such a scenario, that would imply a purchase price for Personal