While there's a lot to unpack from Schwab's latest survey of independent RIA advisors, the leader of its advisor services division argues it can be summed up in a few words.
"We see the RIA story as one of vision, resilience, and momentum, powered by the engine of independence," Jon Beatty, managing director and head of Schwab Advisor Services, said in an interview with InvestmentNews.
Beatty took over as head at Schwab's advisor-focused division last year alongside the surprise announcement of veteran Benie Clark's retirement. Now overseeing a business that serves more than 16,000 independent advisory firms representing $4.7 trillion in AUM, Beatty has had a long and enduring tenure at Schwab, stretching back nearly three decades.
"I think we can see in the study that advisors are redefining leadership, adopting AI with purpose and intent, and strengthening client trust through loyalty and and referrals," Beatty says.
More than half of respondents in Schwab’s 2025 Independent Advisor Outlook Study saw themselves as "client champions" (57%) and "business builders" (54%). For Beatty, the slight edge in favor of the "client champions" camp is a "reassuring" statistic.
"Tie goes to the runner, and they're always putting their clients first in their business model," he says.
While independent advisors consistently see themselves as leaders of their firms, Beatty says that vision is evolving for the future. Aside from mentoring the next generation, he says independent advisors are spending valuable time on innovating their businesses and investing in the legacies they're striving to build.
"If you look at how they're operating internally within their firms, you can see that they're looking to take care of their talent within the business and boost compensation for employees and the owners," Beatty says. "They're also investing in technology to support the client experience and the smart scale and efficiency they're trying to drive in their business."
Three-fifths of independent advisory firms are embracing AI, Schwab's study found, with research and analysis, client communications, and document drafting being the hottest early use cases. Over time, participants in the study said they want to take AI further, bringing it into the operating experience for their employees, as well as sales and marketing and client communications.
Beatty pointed to Schwab's rollout of its "Knowledge Center," which he described as "an AI utility" for its service professionals to research topics, solve complexity, and "give first-time resolution scenarios more often in the service experience for our advisors." While advisors don't have the capability to work directly with the tool as of now, he's hopeful that will happen in the future as the tool gets stronger.
Beyond the early wins from AI, the study also looked into concerns around the risks surrounding the technology. Even as they leverage the technology to accelerate their business, Beatty says a good percentage of independent advisors are proceeding with caution, adopting policies and procedures specifically around artificial intelligence.
"The last thing you want to be doing is putting end-client private information into a public utility," he says. "They're training employees on how to use the artificial intelligence. Many are rolling out either Copilot or or other solutions so that their employees can learn, but in the appropriate environment with the right guardrails and risk and policy procedures."
Apart from responsible AI use policies, Beatty emphasized the importance of competency around data. For AI to generate good answers and enhance business operations, he says clean, noise-free data is a non-negotiable.
"We see many firms leaning into data lakes and data warehousing as basic utilities to build their artificial intelligence solutions on top of," he says.
While a lot of the love for technology has come from its ability to scale operations and raise productivity, Beatty touted its potential to create high-end relational experiences between professionals and clients.
That's especially crucial as more independent RIAs rethink their approaches to organic growth. Compared to the traditional advisor-led growth model, where advisors would create share-of-wallet wins with existing clients as well as referrals to new clients, 71% of respondents to Schwab's survey agreed new clients are the ideal metric for organic growth.
"I think firms are waking up to the idea that that new client acquisition is also a responsibility of the enterprise, and starting to develop digital marketing and other resources to bring lead gen into the firm to support their advisors," Beatty says. "Enterprise lead generation is becoming more and more critical for firms to continue their pace of growth as they get larger."
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