LPL’s Marc Cohen: RIA consolidation will accelerate in 2026

After another year of record-breaking M&A deals among RIAs, LPL’s chief growth officer Marc Cohen expects even more industry-wide consolidation to occur in 2026.

“Consolidation is going to continue. There's talk about whether or not it could continue at the pace that we've seen, I think it'll accelerate,” Cohen told InvestmentNews. “I think it will go faster.”

RIA merger and acquisition activity is on pace to pass 300 transactions this year, according to DeVoe & Co, passing the previous annual record of 272 set in 2024. There were 127 RIA deals reached in 2019, a year that is seen as a turning point in when private equity began to aggressively pursue investing in registered investment advisors. Many of those investments are nearing the “maturity point” of private equity’s deal cycle, Cohen says.

“If you think back to a little bit pre-covid, when some of those initial large volume of investments were being made, you're at around five, six year tenure right now. I think you're going to start to see those expiring, and as a result you're going to see those properties traded. That's going to accelerate some of the movement, because you're going to have a new investor into these firms that's going to look to make their own mark.”

The pressures placed upon private equity-backed large RIAs to generate returns for their shareholders will increasingly drive these firms to become sellers, says the LPL exec.

“Some of the large scale players that are operating with private equity capital I think are going to have a challenge continuing to compete as a meaningful platform in the space, because they're constrained in the investments that they can make in order for their shareholders to receive the types of cash flow returns that they're looking for,” said Cohen. “From a recruiting position standpoint, they're going to have a hard time telling their story. And I think that as a result of that, you're going to see some of these firms probably looking to sell or take investment.”

Cohen likened this dynamic to the factors felt by Commonwealth founder Joseph Deitch and CEO Wayne Bloom ahead of selling their firm to LPL at the end of March for $2.7 billion. Upwards of 80% of Commonwealth advisors have signed with LPL, with Cohen saying “we feel really good” about expecting to reach the 90% retention target set by LPL’s CEO Rich Steinmeier.

“It's the largest transaction in the independent wealth space in the history of the industry, by a very wide margin when you consider a firm that's got nearly $300 billion of assets and almost 3,000 advisors, and obviously the price point that was paid for [Commonwealth],” said Cohen. There's likely to continue to be more consolidation in the IBD [independent broker-dealer] marketplace.”

LPL’s active year on the M&A front also included its November minority stake in Private Advisor Group, an RIA and OSJ with $40 billion in client assets that had been affiliated with LPL since 1997. Cohen said that LPL is open to continue investing in its larger affiliated firms, but future transactions are more likely to be for full acquisitions of RIAs over making minority investments.

“What you might see us doing a bit more of is not necessarily the minority but more full acquisition. That feeds into the succession planning conversation more often than not,” said Cohen. “The minority [investing] I think, is an opportunistic type of thing for us more than anything.”