As independent RIA firms fight tooth and nail for advisor talent amid record-breaking merger and acquisition activity, one wealth management executive says the industry may be focusing on the wrong variables entirely.
Rather than compensation or technology, Shaun Hauser, chief executive officer of Wellington-Altus Private Wealth, argues that culture is what draws entrepreneurial advisors to independent platforms – and what keeps them there.
At the Calgary-based independent wealth management firm, he says a commitment to independence has helped grown from zero to more than $50 billion CAD in assets under administration in just nine years. In a recent interview, Hauser offered a pointed diagnosis of why advisors leave large institutions – and what independent firms must do to avoid repeating the same mistakes at scale.
"Culture beats strategy 10 out of 10 times," Hauser said. "We think advisors generally move because they're emotionally disenfranchised at where they are and they want to get back to having fun again."
According to the DeVoe & Company 2025 RIA M&A Outlook Report, cultural fit surged to become the single most important characteristic buyers look for when evaluating an acquisition – selected by 69% of acquirers in 2025, up from just 17% the year prior and a negligible 4% in 2023. That is a rise of more than 50 percentage points in a single year, and the first time in the survey's history that culture has topped the list, surpassing talent strength, which fell from 51% in 2024 to just 15% in 2025.
Hauser's central argument is straightforward: Whether or not they're breakaways, he believes successful advisory teams are entrepreneurs at heart, and the bureaucratic structure of large financial institutions is fundamentally incompatible with that mindset.
"Bureaucracy is not set up to manage entrepreneurs," he said. "It can't even relate to entrepreneurs."
At large banks and wirehouses, Hauser said advisors are routinely asked to sell credit cards, mortgages, and other financial products as part of cross-selling mandates driven by management consultants – obligations that have little to do with serving clients well and a great deal to do with institutional metrics.
"Those things aren't about what's good for the client," he said. "It's what's good for the organization."
The result, in his view, is predictable: mass migration, which Hauser has seen as an outside observer to the US in the past 10 years. Much of the exodus has gone to the independent RIA channel, where advisors can align themselves better with client interests and exercise greater autonomy over how they build their practice.
North of the border, Wellington-Altus' growth story has been one to watch. Since hitting $40 billion CAD last year, Hauser said it has gone on to surpass $50 billion CAD in 273 days thanks to a combination of market returns, organic growth, and inorganic acquisition. Like other fast-growing firms, it has to find a balance between achieving scale and maintaining its cultural identity.
"At the end of the day, culture is a huge deal for us," he said. "Feeling that our advisors feel they're cared for by us, knowing that we care about them like they care about their clients."
While he highlighted the importance of technology and economics – "There's no receivables issue in our business, no tangible costs of goods sold, no need to buy raw materials for factories" – he insisted those are secondary to his firm's success.
"Primarily speaking, our success focuses on getting our advisors back to being their best versions of themselves," Hauser said.
The DeVoe report frames this challenge in broader terms, noting that the rise of large, private equity-backed enterprises – what the report calls "meta-RIAs" – is reshaping the competitive landscape and raising the bar for what advisory firms must deliver. Concern about meta-RIAs has more than doubled since 2023, with 27% of RIA leaders now sharing worries about their impact. At the same time, private equity now drives approximately 70% of RIA M&A activity in the US, giving well-capitalized acquirers structural advantages in technology, talent, and service breadth that smaller independent firms struggle to match.
Read more: Consolidators fuel RIA recruiting boom
Rather than chasing scale for its own sake, Hauser argues acquisitive firms should make their cultural proposition compelling enough for advisors to join.
"What an entrepreneur is looking for is a partner," he said. "They're not looking for someone that just says yes to everything. They're looking for somebody that simply tries to think a little bit more like them."
Hauser also offered perspective on where the Canadian independent wealth space sits relative to the US — a comparison increasingly relevant as US-backed platforms look north. He estimated Canada is roughly a decade behind the US, owing to the large sway of the major Canadian banks as well as a delay in technology adoption.
Recently, Corient – the acquisitive mega-RIA platform backed by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company – announced plans to enter the Canadian market by taking a portion of CI Financial, its Canada-based parent's ultra-high-net-worth business representing approximately $10 billion in assets. To Hauser, that's a sign that the dynamics playing out in the US are beginning to take shape in the Great White North as well.
"Canada is reflecting a more advanced model of what we've seen in private equity as it relates to wealth management, and just mirroring what's going on in the United States," he said.
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