IMA Wealth

IMA Wealth

IMA Wealth formed in 2001 as the registered investment advisor and private-wealth arm of IMA Financial Group, a Kansas-based insurance brokerage founded by the VanGilder family that remains one of the largest privately held insurance intermediaries in the United States. The wealth unit serves high-net-worth individuals, trusts, corporations, and the partners of its parent brokerage, anchoring itself in Wichita with a regional client base concentrated across the Great Plains and Mountain West. Allocation spans private credit via direct lending and mezzanine, commercial real estate equity, and private equity co-investments alongside a curated network of general partners. Portfolio construction leans toward current-income generation and tax efficiency rather than growth-stage technology, reflecting client demographics shaped by multi-decade business exits and agricultural-family balance sheets. The firm also manages public-markets portfolios in-house, blending direct indexing with manager selection for fixed income and equities, and operates a trust-services practice in Colorado through its IMA Trust subsidiary. The platform reported over $2 billion in client assets as of mid-decade, though AUM figures are not routinely published and the private-markets book remains unquantified in public filings. September 2023: IMA Financial opened a 60,000-square-foot headquarters campus expansion in downtown Wichita, signaling deepening commitment to onshore operational infrastructure (per Wichita Business Journal, September 2023). The parent group employs roughly 800 professionals across insurance, wealth, and corporate divisions. IMA Wealth's structural differentiator is its insurance-brokerage adjacency. Because the parent company already advises mid-market businesses on risk, benefits, and succession, wealth-management leads arrive pre-qualified — often at the point of a commercial insurance renewal or a buy-sell agreement review. That referral engine, rare among standalone RIAs, gives IMA an integrated distribution pipe underwriters cannot easily replicate.