Succession planning has quietly become one of the biggest brakes on wirehouse advisors' path to independence, according to Louis Diamond, CEO of advisor recruiting firm Diamond Consultants — even as the RIA channel itself keeps growing.
“The biggest thing that probably mutes some of the breakaway activity is succession dynamics,” he told InvestmentNews. “Most advisors are part of teams these days and just given the average age of [leaders in] the industry, pretty much every team is going to have some sort of succession dynamic.”
This, he explained, could be the founder or the largest advisor who’s close to retirement, or another element of the team. “When that happens, it's harder for someone close to retirement to justify leaving, because all the [wirehouse] firms have retirement deals,” Diamond said. “It does oftentimes delay an advisor's desire to go independent because they want to keep the team together or they have a chance to take over a book, they don't want to jeopardize it, or it's just a financial consideration.”
Wirehouses are keenly aware of this dynamic, which has prompted them to sweeten succession deals for retiring advisors.
“All the firms have some version of a retire-in-place deal, which is essentially ‘we'll provide some sort of multiple for you to do nothing and just transfer relationships to your team or to a next generation’,” said Diamond.
But he acknowledges the counterpoint, where the succession dynamic is a catalyst for people to go RIA. “From a tax standpoint, being able to sell at long-term capital gains is always appealing,” he said. “And sometimes it's like - hey, I don't want to retire here, or I don't want to encumber my team to stay here.”
Certainly, the RIA channel has enjoyed significant growth in recent years – data released earlier this year by Cerulli Associates show that, over the past decade, assets under management at independent and hybrid RIAs have expanded at annualized rates of 10.9% and 12.2%, respectively. Independent and hybrid RIAs have also increased their combined share of industry assets from 21% in 2014 to 27% in 2024, boosted by advisors defecting from wirehouses, national and regional broker-dealers, insurance broker-dealers, and banks.
“We still see a good amount of breakaway activity but in my view, at least, it's pulled back a bit from where it was, let's say, 3 to 5 years ago,” Diamond told InvestmentNews. “But it's always a cycle - it ebbs and flows.”
“We definitely still see people that are really excited about going independent and lean into it,” Diamond added.
As for key trends within the breakaway space, Diamond told InvestmentNews that the teams going RIA have become progressively larger.
Among the biggest of these is OpenArc Corporate Advisory, a $129 billion team based in Atlanta, Georgia, that broke away from Merrill Lynch in 2025, prompting a legal challenge from the wirehouse.
Diamond, whose company worked on the OpenArc move, acknowledges that the sheer scale of that breakaway makes it an outlier that skews the averages. But he also sees it as part of a broader trend. “The groups that land in the RIA world, they're definitely getting larger and more complex,” he said. “For the most part … they're almost like running their own independent business within the confines of a [wirehouse] firm.”
Recent research from private wealth intelligence platform FINTRX found that, in the first quarter of 2026, 271 independent RIAs crossed the $500-million milestone in assets under management, and 167 crossed the $1 billion mark. Together, the 438 firms now manage $345.4 billion in client assets, up significantly from a year ago, when just 132 firms crossed the same thresholds. As well as organic growth, acquisition and teams migrating from wirehouses and independent broker dealers are fueling this trend, according to FINTRX.
Diamond also notes the ongoing trends that are prompting advisors to jump ship from the wirehouse world. “Pretty much every advisor at a wirehouse complains about some sort of friction with being able to build their team, whether it's a hiring freeze or inability to target people that they want to, or kind of locked into whatever the firm's willing to pay,” said Diamond. “They're not really able to grow the teams in a way that's going to really fuel their growth.”
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