Greg Cook

Financial advice businesses, Eureka Whittaker Macnaught (EWM) and Blue Harbour Financial Partners (Blue Harbour) will merge in a move designed to deliver scale and efficiency benefits, career opportunities for employees, and a strengthened value proposition for clients.

With a rich history dating back to the 1960s, EWM has offices in Sydney, Central Coast, Newcastle and Brisbane, and provides holistic goals-based advice. It recently expanded its offer to include finance and mortgage broking.

Established in 2002, Blue Harbour Financial Partners is based at Cleveland in Brisbane and specialises in superannuation, retirement and estate planning.

Together, the combined entity will employ 32 people including 14 financial advisers, across five locations. This includes its fifth Professional Year candidate. It will continue to trade under both EWM and Blue Harbour in the short term.

According to Greg Cook, co-founder and Chief Executive of EWM, the deal unites two high quality, like-minded businesses of comparable size to form a large, integrated firm with significant scale, capability and capacity.

The combined entity will have one management team, under the leadership of Cook and General Manager Sally Bell, with a clear vision to build a strong professional services super firm.

“I’m very excited about our future. Our mission is to be our clients’ trusted adviser and the ringmaster of their financial affairs, which is a key driver behind our growth strategy and recent decision to establish a mortgage and lending business,” Cook said.

“We also have great capability with self-managed super and aged care advice, and we have great advice relationships with industry superannuation.”

Todd Hitchcock, Chief Executive of Blue Harbour, said the group’s merger with EWM would deliver many benefits to employees, advisers and clients including a stable, experienced management team.

“I’ll still be involved in the business and I’m always thinking about the future to ensure that the business will be around for a long time to serve our people and our clients,” Hitchcock said.

Cook added: “EWM has experienced strong growth, both organically and through M&A, and we have ambitious plans to become a formidable, multi-disciplinary super firm”.

EWM and Blue Harbour are both part of the AZ NGA group.

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