Ironbark to consolidate brands in shake-up to create national firm

Ironbark Financial Group will combine 15 different businesses into a single super firm with the goal of building a nationally recognised brand.

Ironbark CEO and co‑founder Chris Larsen tells Professional Planner that one of the challenges facing the industry was building national brands which consumers can trust.

“This is ultimately the pathway we’ve chosen, and we want to be one of those brands,” Larsen says.

The firm has largely flown under the radar with few media appearances, but as the group becomes a national brand, Larsen says this will change.

“We’ve been a firm – rightly or wrongly – that’s just wanted to focus on our clients and make sure that as we have been growing, they’re front and centre,” Larsen says.

“We haven’t spent all the time in the media… but you will see us do more of it and take more of a role in how we view the industry, how we think it should be guided in the future.

Under the new structure, parent company Ironbark Financial Group will operate Ironbark Advice, Ironbark Private Wealth and Ironbark Investment Solutions as the three sub-brands.

Ironbark Advice will be centred on mass market financial advice, Ironbark Private Wealth will focus on the high-net-worth segment, while Ironbark Investment Solutions will consist of the asset management and corporate trustee services.

Larsen says the desire to create one enterprise emerged after M&A activity led to the collection of 15 firms over the past five years.

“It’s really difficult to convey one consistent message to your clients with 15 different brands,” Larsen says.

“It starts with your people as well. You want your people to buy into the concept of one enterprise, one vision, one strategy and you equally want your clients to understand what all are the various things that they can get access to inside the group.”

Larsen says the firm has an open architecture model and partners with asset consultants including Russell Investments, Evidentia and Drummond Capital, with the latter offering a private market focus.

“When we think about the verticals we want to play in and the verticals we don’t want to play in, certainly right now asset consulting is not a vertical we want to play in,” Larsen says.

“We’re committed to open architecture around those relationships, and I don’t think you’re going to see that change. We genuinely see ourselves as a fiduciary.”

Ironbark head of strategy Justin Greiner says the firm is “pretty relaxed” about what platforms advisers use. “We use a bunch of platforms in our business,” he says.

The other brands owned by the company will be retired and there is no change to the business or advice process which the pair say has been settled before the rebrand project started.

Ironbark has a small equity stake in Viridian Advisory, where it also shares an office floor in Sydney, but both entities will continue to remain separate.

Ironbark Advice employs 128 advisers across 35 locations in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.

The advice and private wealth arms will be led by David Stephen, who was managing director of Invest Blue, which merged with Ironbark in September 2023.

“He will continue to run those as he has been doing since we merged a couple of years ago” Larsen said.

Alex Donald will run the investment solutions business, Brendan Carpenter will be group chief operating officer, and Greiner will lead group strategy and M&A which will continue to be a core focus of the broader business strategy.

Greiner says acquiring businesses is “easy”, but the hard part is integration. “M&A is challenging, right across the industry we see that,” he says.

The licensing arrangements vary across the advice businesses and Larsen says there will be plans to simplify that soon.

“I won’t go through them in detail, because they’re not quite signed off but suffice to say, we will be consolidating our license strategy,” Larsen says.

“When you think about what I said at the start, our fiduciary obligations and governance, clearly us consolidating one licensee or a couple of licences enables us to build a better risk framework, build better risk controls, and that’s in the client’s best interest. It helps us deliver better advice.”

Ironbark has more than $93 billion under advice, management and trusteeship as of 31 December 2025.

The firm was founded in 2009 by former Deutsche Bank colleagues Larsen and Carpenter and is a privately held company.