Fee-for-service financial planning hit $1 billion in lifetime fees processed through AdvicePay last year – a milestone that seemed more like a moonshot a decade ago, when major payment processors said the market was too small to bother with.
The number, drawn from more than 2 million transactions across the AdvicePay platform, marks the moment fee-for-service planning – once dismissed as a niche workaround for advisors who couldn't attract high-net-worth clients – crossed into institutional scale. Today, 11 of the top 15 broker-dealers use AdvicePay to manage their fee-for-service billing and compliance workflows.
"The question isn't whether fee-for-service works anymore," CEO and co-founder Alan Moore said in a statement celebrating the platform's 10th anniversary on Wednesday. "It's how quickly broker-dealers and RIAs can deploy it across their entire advisor base."
For AdvicePay, the 10 years of data built up on its platform represents a real vindication of the model. The company's 2026 Fee-for-Service Industry Trend Report, drawn from more than 525,000 transactions, found that 85.6% of invoices on the AdvicePay platform last year came from recurring subscriptions – up from 83% in 2023. Average monthly subscription fees rose to $291, a 4.7% year-over-year uptick, while quarterly subscription fees climbed 9.4% to $1,074.
The genesis of AdvicePay grew out of a gap Moore felt early on in his career. In 2012, at 25, he was fired from his RIA and decided to start his own firm. Faced with the obvious question – how do you attract baby boomer millionaires? – he had a contrarian answer.
"I don't know any baby boomer millionaires," Moore said. "But I do know people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. They're getting married, they have student loans, they're getting divorced, they're moving across the country for a new job. They're dealing with all of these life issues that were frankly more interesting to me than Social Security distribution strategies."
While conventional industry wisdom held that younger clients couldn't afford financial planning, Moore had a different take. "They don't have the assets to support an asset-based fee, but they do have income to support a cash flow-based fee," he said.
What they didn't have was a frictionless way to pay for it; the best option at the time was mailing a monthly check. To bridge the gap, Moore partnered with Michael Kitces to co-found AdvicePay.
As Moore tells it, the shift over the past decade has been more of a slow burn than a big bang. "This industry moves 2% a year," he said. "Over the course of a year, that's not very much. Over the course of 10 to 20 years, that's where you really see transformational change."
One of the most telling data points in AdvicePay's anniversary report, according to Moore, punctures the narrative that fee-for-service clients can't be as sticky as AUM-based engagements.
"The assumption, when we first started AdvicePay, was that attrition rates of fee-for-service clients would be significantly higher than AUM. What we're seeing is the growth of subscription billing – ongoing relationships," Moore said. "The real value of financial planning has never been in the plan. It's always been in the relationship with the advisor who truly knows you."
To make the point, Moore cited a well-known comic by advisor, author, and podcast host Carl Richards which shows an advisor standing between a client and a bad decision. "Stopping them from selling at the bottom of the market – that's the game-changing decision," Moore said. "And that only happens every 10 years sometimes in a relationship."
"Doing one-time plans for $1,000 or $2,000 provides great value. It's a really hard business to scale," he added. "Subscription billing is predictable. It's not tied to the markets."
According to Moore, the fee-for-service movement started to gain meaningful traction after 2008, when cratering markets exposed the drawbacks of the AUM model: Suddenly, advisors who were working twice as hard to earn half as much were starting to rethink their options.
Today, he sees a similar story playing out through transaction volumes on AdvicePay, which he says tend to spike during wild markets. "Every time we see the market drop, we get a pop in users looking for non-market-dependent income sources," he said.
The 10th anniversary also marks roughly one year since AdvicePay acquired AdvisorBOB, a compensation software company targeting RIAs with 20 to 100 advisors. The point of the acquisition, Moore said, was to complete the revenue lifecycle – AdvicePay handles money coming into the firm, while AdvisorBOB handles how it flows out to advisors.
"I knew before we bought AdvisorBOB that compensation in RIAs was complex," he said. "And I had no idea just how complex it is. It never ceases to amaze me how much advisory firms can overcomplicate their own lives."
Most firms, he said, are still running compensation calculations in Excel spreadsheets – often with macros only the CEO understands – spending days each month on a process that should be automated.
"This is back-office work," Moore acknowledged. "It doesn't get headlines. It's not AI or some super sexy tech thing. But it's our bread and butter. We love compliance-heavy, regulation-heavy complexity."
Looking ahead, Moore pushed back against what he views as the industry's over-rotation on AI as an advisor-killer. "I don't buy any of it," he said. "What people are looking for is advice from a human they connect with, that they have a relationship with, that they trust. That is not going away."
He also challenged the idea that AI will substantially close the looming advisor-client gap over the next decade. "There's just a limit to the number of deep relationships an advisor can have with their clients," he said. "Saving time on back-office tasks doesn't just suddenly double that number."
Instead, he expects AI to help advisors deliver more personalized value within existing relationships – which, in a fee-for-service model, translates into a case for charging more.
Longer-term, he imagines a shift toward a still mostly untapped opportunity, with cutthroat competition for high-net-worth baby boomers giving way to a blue ocean in fee-for-service.
"There are probably 100 million Americans that fit into this category," Moore said. "Clients with money in a 401(k), a small business, stock options, real estate – people who just don't have liquid investable assets. That's a huge swath of people that fee-for-service can serve in a really meaningful way."
"Advisors don't want to sacrifice flexibility and ownership in order to access that institutional quality resources and support," Concurrent's Joe Mooney says as his Merchant-backed RIA crosses $20 billion AUM.
Survey finds policy hurdles and education gaps are shaping how advisors approach crypto allocations.
“We wanted to do shareholder activism,” says Chicory Wealth founder and CEO Max Kulyk.
A nearly 90-point basis point increase from Fidelity led one RIA to move all of their long-short SMA client accounts to Schwab.
Among other benefits, CEO Daryl Seaton says the Merchant partnership gives the $6.5 billion RIA capital for its advisor partnership program and compete for M&A targets.
Growth may get the headlines, but in my experience, longevity is earned through structure, culture, and discipline
Ultra-high-net-worth investors aren’t retreating from risk. They're redefining it, balancing safety with selective conviction
