Goldman Sachs: RIA M&A market defies corporate slowdown

RIA industry transactions appear immune to the broader slowdown of corporate M&A amid global trade disruption, Goldman Sachs executives said today at an event in New York City.

“We see a very active market here, and it's remained active,” said Adam Siegler, head of One Goldman Sachs RIA Strategy. “There’s been very little, if any slowdown.” 

DeVoe & Company’s latest RIA Deal Book, released last month, documented 75 mergers and acquisitions in the first quarter of this year. This deal total represents the most active Q1 on record, and a 15% increase over the same period in 2024. DeVoe & Company recorded 272 M&A deals among RIAs in 2024, the most active year on record. 

The optimism for RIA M&A defies the ongoing corporate M&A slowdown, president and COO John Waldron said during the second-annual RIA Professional Investor Forum hosted at Goldman Sachs’ headquarters. 

“We thought that this would be a pretty bullish year for M&A, larger-scale corporate M&A, more industry defining transactions,” Waldron said Wednesday. “Anything large and transformational generally speaking is being paused. Because it's a very uncertain environment with your own business plan, much less your partner's business plan on the proposed merger. So it's very hard to do those transactions, they are hard to price.” Waldron is speculated to be the successor to current Goldman CEO, David Solomon.

Leaders from approximatly 100 RIAs and independent advisor firms attended the Goldman Sachs’ conference. The investment bank has increasingly pushed into the RIA space over the past few years, starting with its $750 million acquisition of the RIA United Capital in 2019 that it then sold to Creative Planning in 2023. 

“The decision to sell United Capital to Creative Planning in 2023 [...] it said as clearly as we could to the market, 'we're here to serve you, not to compete with you by owning our own RIA,'” Siegler said. “We see this as a mega trend, the growth of independent advisor. The numbers certainly speak for themselves in terms of the trillions and trillions of dollars that RIAs are advising for clients now.”

Goldman Sachs has grown its RIA custody services through its partnerships with Dynasty Financial and the mega RIA, NewEdge Wealth. The firm has also expanded its mutual funds, ETFs, equity SMAs, and evergreen fund investment offering tailored to RIAs in partnership with GeoWealth and iCapital. 

Goldman Sachs has been weighing the launch of its own client referral program for RIAs, as reported by CityWire in April. Padi Raphael, Global Co-Head of Third-Party Wealth at Goldman Sachs, was non-committal on Wednesday when asked by InvestmentNews about a potential referral program, but added, “the door is always open.”

“We don't have such a program today,” Raphael said. “We are in the early days of evolving our strategy. I'm sure over time, we're going to continue to think about new ways to add value and bring more value to our clients. So the door is always open for us to think about how we can be a better value add to our client base,” Raphael said.