How Citizens Wealth Management Used Maus to Grow AUM Through Exit Planning

Bridging Two Sides of a Major Bank

Citizens Financial Group is one of the nation's oldest and largest financial institutions, with approximately $220 billion in assets and roughly 1,000 branches across 14 states. Its commercial banking, wealth management, and advisory businesses serve individuals, small businesses, middle-market companies, and large corporations. Wealth management is a declared strategic priority: the firm's wealth division reported $28 billion in AUM in 2024, up 21% year-over-year, backed by significant investment in talent and infrastructure across key markets nationwide.

Central to that strategy is an integrated model: private banking, wealth advisory, and commercial banking working in close collaboration on behalf of shared clients. In practice, that integration doesn't happen automatically. Business owner clients who bank on the commercial side are often the same people who need sophisticated personal wealth planning, but the two conversations rarely connect in a structured way.

Lara Ferguson is a CEPA-credentialed Senior Planner within Citizens Wealth Management who built a repeatable process to make that connection happen. Bankers and wealth advisors spoke different languages and approached client relationships from different angles. Without a shared framework, high-value business owner relationships stayed siloed. Personal wealth remained separate from business wealth, and the handoff between teams rarely happened proactively.

Ferguson needed a tool that could serve as common ground: something that would open a meaningful business conversation, produce a compliance-friendly deliverable, and engage the client deeply enough to earn trust across both sides of the house. She found that in Maus.

A Veterinarian with a 25-Year Practice and No Clear Exit Plan

The engagement centered on a veterinarian who had operated a successful practice for over 25 years. He was a business banking client at Citizens and had begun conversations with his banker about retirement planning. He had identified a junior veterinarian within his own practice as a likely buyer, but neither party had a clear picture of what the transaction should look like, how it should be structured, or what it would ultimately be worth.

The banker, knowing Lara, made the introduction. The exit planning engagement began from there.

On a personal financial level, the owner was not well-organized — he had broad ideas about how he wanted the transition to work but lacked the structured knowledge to execute. He wasn’t aware of all the moving pieces, and the tax and structuring implications of the deal had not been thought through.

One Team, One Table, One Plan

Ferguson opened the engagement with the Maus business valuation and assessment tools to establish a defensible range of value and identify the gaps that needed to be addressed before a transaction could move forward.

The assessment surfaced a key risk: owner dependency. The practice's value was closely tied to the founding veterinarian personally, which is common in professional service businesses. Addressing that risk, including documenting processes and formalizing transition readiness, became part of the engagement work.

Citizens assembled a full team around the client. Before the liquidity event occurred, the owner had already consolidated his personal wealth at Citizens, moving retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, and other assets under the firm's management. That relationship was established before the deal closed, which proved to be a defining advantage.

When buyer, seller, and exit planner sat down together, the Maus valuation report gave the conversation a credible, objective foundation. Both parties had a shared reference point for what the business was worth, which reduced the emotional friction that often derails deals between parties who know each other personally.

The transaction had real complexity. The seller owned the real estate in addition to the practice. Rather than sell both simultaneously, the buyer purchased the practice while the seller retained the building, with a plan to acquire the property in a subsequent transaction once the new owner had stabilized operations. That structure kept the buyer's debt load manageable while preserving meaningful upside for the seller.

The seller also chose a combination of lump sum payment and seller financing, which provided tax advantages. The installment payments are now being invested and managed through Citizens, creating a recurring asset management relationship that extends well beyond the closing date.

The Results

A Relationship That Keeps Growing

How Maus Made It Work

Two Maus outputs were central to the engagement:

• Business Valuation Report. Produced a compliance-friendly range of value that gave all parties a credible, objective starting point for negotiation.

• Priority Action Plan. Reflected the client's own assessment responses back to them, making the gaps concrete and the recommendations feel grounded rather than generic. Clients who answer the questions are more invested in the results.

Ferguson also points to the assessment process itself as a relationship tool. The act of walking a client through structured questions about their own business creates a depth of conversation that a traditional advisory meeting rarely reaches. By the time the deliverable is presented, the client already has ownership of the findings.