Revealed: the fastest-growing fee-only RIAs of 2024

After an exhaustive selection process, InvestmentNews is revealing its list of fastest-growing fee-only RIAs in the US for 2024.

Taken together, the 74 firms on the list – which do not receive commission-based revenue and are not actively engaged in business as broker-dealers – oversee $212 billion in reported assets under management.

Looking at the period from July 2021 until July 2024, the names on InvestmentNews' second annual fastest-growing fee-only RIA report saw a three-year growth rate of 210.3 percent on average, with an average of 3,103 accounts across all firms by the end of that time.

To make the cut, firms had to meet a battery of requirements, including a minimum of $100 million in assets under management with no more than half of those regulatory assets being attributable to pension and profit-sharing plans. Their form ADVs for the latest completed fiscal year must also show that they managed assets for individual clients, and they must have financial planning services as part of their offerings.

One of this year's winning firms, Pension & Wealth Management Advisors, is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Its arc of years-long growth is part of an ambitious seven-year plan to scale up from roughly $75 million to $1 billion in AUM.

"We felt that an independent boutique wealth management firm needs to have a minimum of $250 million AUM to have the proper scale to be competitive over the long run,” said CEO George Webb, who stepped into the chief executive role at PWMA in 2019.

Over the course of his tenure, Webb said the firm has focused on hiring to help support its growth plans. That's in line with one insight from Schwab's 2024 RIA Benchmarking study, which found roughly three-quarters of RIA firms have hired over each of the past five years. More broadly, that study estimates the industry will need 70,000 new advisors and wealth management professionals to enable growth over the next half-decade.

"I focused on building the backbone of our operational team," Webb said. "You can’t scale a business unless you have high quality people providing the operational and client service expertise.”

Another study by the Investment Adviser Association in 2024 found fixed and hourly fees have become increasingly common over the past 10 years, with advisors that offer financial planning services being the most likely to use those models.

Asset-based and investment performance-based fees still have a place, as they linked advisors compensation to their clients' portfolios. But only 17.1 percent of advisors said they get their fees from AUM models alone, which points to a rising fiduciary tide – something that the fastest-growing fee-only RIAs are definitely tapping into.

"Being an independent RIA allows us to be one of the purest forms of fiduciary because we don't have any bank, broker-dealer, or insurance company affiliations. We're not selling our clients anything," Webb said. "We're perfectly aligned in terms of serving them and if they do well, the firm will do just fine."

To read InvestmentNews' report on the fastest-growing fee-only RIAs in full, click here.