Fidelity M&A report finds growing pool of RIA buyers

A new M&A report from Fidelity finds that the number of RIA acquirers increased to 102 firms in 2025, while also seeing over half of the purchased assets gobbled up by 20 of the most active firms. 

A record-setting 276 transactions for $796 billion in acquired assets occurred in 2025, according to Fidelity’s report that tracks publicly announced deals. Previous records set in 2024 tracked 233 transactions for $669 billion in acquired RIA assets. 

The number of total buyers reached 102 last year, jumping from 82 buyers in 2024 and 87 in 2023. Fidelity also identified a “Leading 20 Acquirer Cohort” of 20 firms that participated in 156 of the 276 RIA deals (57%) and bought 55% of all acquired assets. 

“Strategic acquirers do dominate the landscape in terms of acquisitions, but we counted 102 buyers this year and that is the most amount of buyers we've ever seen,” said Laura McElroy, VP and senior business consultant at Fidelity Institutional. 

Private equity backed 88% of all RIA acquisitions in 2025, including all of Fidelity’s top 20 acquiring firms. Fidelity’s report notes that a “growing number of private equity firms are backing multiple acquirers simultaneously,” with nine firms having stakes in multiple acquirers compared to six private equity firms in 2024 who held ownership in multiple acquirers.  

“We have a lot of private equity moving into registered investment advisory firms. We have a lot of excitement around the sheer fragmentation of this space,” said McElroy. “Investors see the recurring fee revenue; they can see the potential ROI. So there's very fundamental reasons for M&A on the RIA space, and until those fundamental reasons go away, we're not going to see M&A wane anytime soon.” 

Fidelity’s growing buyer pool contrasts with a report earlier this year from consulting firm DeVoe & Company, which said the dominance of top consolidators resulted in 22 fewer buyers of RIAs in 2025, despite a record-setting number of total transactions. RIAs that were sold in 2025 had a median size of $508 million assets under management at the time of their transaction, according to Fidelity.  

Six of Fidelity’s most active RIA acquirers were newcomers to their top 20 rankings—Creative Planning, Mariner, CW Advisors, Apella Wealth, Composition Wealth, and Arax Investment Partners. They replaced the six exiting firms of Captrust, OneDigital, Bluespring Wealth Partners, Diversify Wealth Management, Sequoia Advisors, and Robertson Stephens Wealth Management. 

Fidelity writes in its report that RIA M&A appears to be heading towards a new chapter of "mega-mergers" between the largest independent advisor firms. Creative Planning has around $700 billion in assets under management to rank among the biggest. Marty Bicknell, CEO of RIA aggregator firm Mariner Wealth Advisors, stated “there's no RIA that's a large firm, and there will be” in Fidelity's report, adding he expects a transformative deal to emerge in the near future.