AE Wealth president Shannon Larson has had a front-row seat to the evolution of the independent wealth channel since starting her career in the early 2000s as a client operations associate at Fisher Investments.
Ken Fisher founded his business in 1979 and grew Fisher Investments to become one of the world’s largest RIAs, and sold minority stakes in 2024 to private equity firm Advent International and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Now as president of an RIA that just passed $50 billion in assets under management, Larson intends for AE Wealth to reach $250 billion by 2035 without taking any private equity or outside investment.
“I think the biggest difference in the shift in the industry is more towards moving advisors from the 1099 independent side to a W-2 model,” Larson told InvestmentNews. “I do think when I go back to the late-90s, early 2000s it was all about going independent. Back then at LPL, we were trying to help recruit advisors away from the wirehouses and the breakaways and support them and help them become independent.”
Larson worked at LPL Financial from 2006 to 2013, then spent a year as VP of wealth management marketing at fellow independent broker-dealer Cetera Financial Group. She joined Kansas-based AE Wealth in February after the previous six years at Osaic. Larson mentioned recent moves from Osaic, Cetera, and Kestra’s Bluespring as wealth management firms that are increasingly pushing W-2 employee advisor models.
“The industry went into this, let's become uber-independent and go RIA. The phases were like, go independent, then it was go RIA, and then it was maybe you're better off not going RIA, stay on an IAR situation,” said Larson. “And then next thing you know, there's this leap from there to W-2. That sort of feels like that's been the progression.”
AE Wealth’s entire footprint of roughly 500 advisors are independent 1099 contractors. They can decide to either affiliate as an IAR (Investment Adviser Representative) to leverage AE Wealth’s Form ADV and compliance, or remain a third-party RIA with their own Form ADV but still access AE Wealth’s technology and investment resources.
“I think organic growth is really our superpower, because we help our advisors build scalable businesses, but then also help them continue to do new client meetings. Our founder says every advisor should be doing four new client meetings a week,” said Larson.
David Callanan and Cody Foster co-founded AE Wealth in 2016 as a subsidiary of insurance marketing organization Advisors Excel. Callanan and Foster retain majority ownership control in AE Wealth via DDC Holdings LLC, according to the RIA’s most recent Form ADV filed March 31. Callanan is the CEO of AE Wealth, which has a team of 200 creative staff to support TV, radio, and digital marketing efforts for advisors located across the U.S.
“Our focus is really on helping our independent business owners grow,” Larson added.
“We will help them with minority investments to help them take capital off, help them with liquidity solutions, but we're very focused on helping them grow in their markets and their businesses, and not owning their business.”
About half of AE Wealth’s $50 billion in assets—roughly $25 billion—are in managed strategies, including model‑based and direct indexing. Larson mentioned that AE Wealth works with advisor software provider Orion and plans to roll out a partnership with BlackRock’s Aladdin software for direct indexing.
"I wanted to operate in a structure where fiduciary duty applies to every client interaction," said Brett Cohen, managing partner at Evolve Private Wealth.
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