March 19, 2026
Jason Diamond quoted
By Tobias Salinger
An estimated 25,443 advisors managing $3.06 trillion in client assets switched firms through recruiting and M&A deals in 2025, according to a report last month by research and consulting firm Cerulli Associates. While most of those advisors stayed in the same industry channel, the rise of registered investment advisory firms and RIA accounts drove the share of wealth management client assets managed under the fiduciary duty to 58% in 2024 from only 40% in 2014. Independent and hybrid RIAs boosted their share of industry assets by six percentage points to 27% over that span. Cerulli projected that independent broker-dealers and hybrid RIAs will gobble up the largest increase in their portion of industry assets from 2025 to 2029.
While the data simply “crystalizes a lot of what we knew to be true,” it also reflects how “independence is a spectrum,” said Jason Diamond, the president of advisor recruiting firm Diamond Consultants and the lead author of its report tracking moves each year.
So, while RIAs and independent advisory firms that work with them as brokerages or in other service capacities are growing rapidly, they face recruiting and retention challenges as well. Besides the advantages of name recognition and scale that keep them in the running among prospective destinations, the largest firms in any channel no longer have as much of an edge, he said. And the biggest RIA aggregators that have expanded so quickly in recent years have been, in some cases, responding to the threat of advisors breaking away for independence by getting “more and more restrictive” in contracts and deal terms designed to retain advisors and assets, Diamond noted.
“You see a little bit of the ugly side of M&A — not just M&A, but also recruiting. Because of how hard it is to find quality talent, firms are going to be increasingly competitive about the talent they do have,” Diamond said. He pointed to how common RIA litigation, traditionally associated with wirehouse breakaways, is becoming these days. “What I care more about is, does this become almost a deterrent to movement?” Diamond added. “And I think the answer is, maybe.”
