Going RIA is a one-way street

As advisor headcount and assets continue to flow from wirehouses and broker-dealers into RIA channels, top RIA industry executives say this trending movement has been a one-way street for the past decade.

“In the history of finance, there’s been a lot of people who have left wirehouses to go to RIAs, but no one’s ever gone from an RIA back to a wirehouse,” said Larry Restieri, CEO of leading mega-RIA aggregator Hightower Advisors. “I think the RIA model allows advisors to really put the client first, and I think it’s just a more fulfilling way for advisors to practice, and that’s why it’s been so popular for advisors.”

Restieri, who was a partner and CEO of Goldman Sachs’ Ayco division before he left the bank last year to join Hightower, was speaking on a panel at the third-annual Goldman Sachs RIA Professional Investor Forum in Manhattan alongside CEOs of other top RIA firms. Also on the panel, Dynasty Financial Partners CEO Shirl Penney agreed, noting, “There are really no takeback brokers. It’s a one-way street. You don’t see advisors going back the other way.”

The RIA industry entry from Goldman Sachs, arguably the most prestigious brand in finance, marks added momentum for the shift toward independent wealth. Goldman tried being a direct player, buying United Capital in 2019 for $750 million in cash, but it sold that RIA to Creative Planning in 2023 to focus as a service provider to RIAs through its GS Custody Solutions platform and its fledgling RIA client referral program, being rolled out this year. 

Data from Cerulli Associates shows that from 2014 to 2024, wirehouse, independent broker-dealer, and insurance broker-dealer channels collectively lost roughly 12 percentage points of advisor headcount share, while independent and hybrid RIA channels grew from approximately 20 to 31 percent of total advisor headcount over the same period. RIA asset share grew from roughly 20 to 27 percent. 

Year-end 2025 market data from Cerulli will be available later this year. Penney tells InvestmentNews that the wealth management industry is still in the “early innings” of its shift toward independent advisor channels.

“One of the biggest reasons why I think we’re still in the early innings is the breakaway client movement is actually four times larger today than the breakaway advisor movement,” he says. “If you look at the migration, [about] $400 billion a year in terms of assets flow into the major custodians − Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing − and now Goldman obviously being in the space and doing well as a new entrant, which I think is contributing to more attention obviously coming at the space as well.”

Of that $400 billion, Penney says that about $100 billion is from breakaway advisors and the other $300 billion is from clients proactively leaving banks and wirehouses for independent advisor models. Susie Cranston, CEO of the RIA and multi-family office Cresset, is also bullish about 2026 still being only the beginning of assets shifting toward RIAs.  

“If you look at the percentage of AUM that’s in the wirehouses versus the RIAs, this year it might be 50−50, but that means there’s so much opportunity that’s still left to migrate,” says Cranston. “And I think we’ll see the continued creation of smaller RIAs that is faster than the consolidation that’s happening. So it feels like early days and a lot more to come.” 

Last year’s breakaway of the $129 billion OpenArc Corporate Advisory team from Merrill Lynch marked the biggest advisor team jump yet from a wirehouse to go independent. Their breakaway was supported with investment, custody, and technology services from Dynasty and Schwab, who remain in litigation with Merrill Lynch over OpenArc’s decision. 

OpenArc caters a large portion of its business to corporate stock plan administration, which has traditionally been controlled by the wirehouse ecosystem but marked as the “last big box that needed to be checked,” in terms of being the one major capability wirehouses had that RIAs didn’t offer advisors.  

“There wasn’t the ability for a stock plan team to go independent and then work alongside an administrative platform to help make sure that clients find their way to the advisors for reinvestment. We checked that box in partnership with Schwab,” says Penney. “It allows us to collaborate and service them in a holistic way that years ago would have been reserved only for the major Wall Street firms.” 

Advisor industry recruiter Louis Diamond of Diamond Consultants points to the capital gains tax benefit of going independent − realized once an advisor decides to sell their RIA − as the obvious leading economic benefit for advisors leaving captive models. The ability to tax-writeoff other business expenses, higher payouts, control of brand marketing, and flexibility to create their own tech stack are other pros of going independent. 

Advisors also need to consider the downsides of going independent. Diamond describes these as the heavy operational lift of running their own business, the forfeiting of unvested deferred compensation and a retirement plan in their current firm, and the realization that net take home may not rise as much as expected. 

 He notes that once the costs of running their own RIA are factored in − such as office space, staffing salaries, website, marketing, legal costs, and custodial fees − the most common cold feet moment sets in for advisors contemplating the jump to independence.

“They have a perception in their mind that they’re going to make all of this extra money. And then they look at P&Ls, and they start running the numbers,” says Diamond. “And it’s like, I’m only going to net like 15 percent more than where I am now. This doesn’t seem worth it − I thought it would be higher.”