Less than three months after being sold by Boston Private Financial Holdings Inc. to a group of private investors, Gibraltar Private Bank and Trust Co. has its sights set on expansion as it looks to add advisors and assets.

Matthew Lapides, the managing director of Gibraltar’s wealth management division, said the Coral Gables, Fla., private banking company “hit a trough” in 2008 when assets under management fell 18.2% to $900 million. However, since the end of the first quarter it has added nearly $100 million of new assets.

“We are already on a strong upward trend from adding new business and we are closing in on getting back over $1 billion in assets under management,” he said. “Our focus is really on growth.”

Gibraltar plans to expand by adding more advisors, Lapides said. This month, it hired an executive from Citigroup’s private bank who is an investment strategist and a private banker. It also hired a chief investment officer this month and made its former chief investment officer a fixed income strategist.

“We have a solid pipeline of recruits, but we want to grow by adding the right people,” Lapides said. “We don’t want to just add staff to increase our headcount unless we can find the right cultural match.”

The company plans to hire across all of its markets in Florida, including Naples, Miami and Fort Lauderdale, and in its office in New York, Lapides said. In addition to hiring, Lapides said Gibraltar wants to expand by cross-selling wealth management products to the company’s private bankers and lenders. “We are really excited about increasing our collaborations,” Lapides said. “We are doing some joint training from an academic sense and, from a cultural sense, people are getting more comfortable working together as teammates. That is the beautiful part about working in a boutique setting.”

Analysts said Gibraltar, which was established in 1994 and has seven full-service private banking and wealth advisory offices, will face challenges and opportunities now that they are no longer affiliated to a large national banking company.

Boston Private sold Gibraltar as part of a wider initiative to purge certain businesses to generate additional capital. In addition to Gibraltar, Boston Private sold Rinet Co. LLC, an advisory firm in Boston for the ultra-wealthy, to its management team for $6 million in September. A month later, Boston Private sold Westfield Capital Management Co. to the company's management team for $59 million.

Before selling Gibraltar, Boston Private said it planned to use the company’s national charter to open offices in other markets. In 2007, it used the charter to open a Gibraltar branch in New York.

Lapides said Gibraltar is exploring the idea of growing in Florida and other markets. “We want to grow in areas that make sense for our business model,” he said. “We are looking to expand organically and will look sensibly at growing beyond that.”

To continue developing its wealth platform, Gibraltar announced Monday it has partnered with Prima Capital to enhance its wealth management platform. Prima, a Denver-based provider of wealth management products and services to banks, broker-dealers, trust companies and large registered investment advisory companies, will provide Gibraltar with upfront selection and on-going due diligence on a number of mutual funds, separately managed accounts, and fund-of-hedge fund investments.

Gibraltar will also incorporate Prima Capital’s capital market assumptions and asset allocation guidance into the construction of portfolios. Gibraltar’s advisors will also be able to use Prima’s web-based investment research application and its proposal generation system. Lapides said Gibraltar began searching for a third-party provider that offered these services as early as last March and considered about 10 companies.

Gibraltar selected Prima in order to gain access to a wider range of traditional and alternative investment products as well as institutional separate account mangers, Lapides said. He added that the decision to partner with Prima had nothing to do with the company being sold by Boston Private. “Our investment offerings were always independent from Boston Private,” he said. “Our investment options didn’t change when we were bought by Boston Private or when we bought ourselves back. By partnering with Prima we have gained access to an incredible talent pool. It would have been economically infeasible for us to build a team like this.”