Building on a years-long professional connection, advisor transition consultant Grier Rubeling has joined Melbourne, Florida-based RIA Rossby Financial and its partner platform ROffice to lead business development, marketing and transition services.
Rubeling is one of three new additions to the Rossby team, which was founded in 2023.
In a statement announcing the news last week, Andrew Evans, founder of Rossby, said Rubeling – who previously held roles at UBS and Smith Barney before setting up her own firm, Advisor Transition Services – was "widely recognized as elite in the industry."
The hire also speaks to a broader challenge that continues to hang over the wealth management business: advisor transitions remain messy, expensive and frequently mismanaged, even as the tools available to support them have improved.
The numbers bear that out. Advisors who switch from a broker-dealer to an independent firm typically lose about 18% of their assets, while those moving between RIAs can lose around 11%, according to Cerulli Associates. The stakes are high, as Cerulli data also project independent RIAs will grow to own 11.8% of the market in the next three years.
In an interview with InvestmentNews, Evans and Rubeling broke down where they see those transitions going wrong – and why the still-going Big Bang in technology hasn't necessarily made the process easier.
Rubeling breaks down the most common issues facing transitioning advisors into three categories: access to information, portability, and expectation setting.
On the information front, she said advisors looking to leave a firm often struggle to find reliable guidance simply because the process demands secrecy. "You don't know who is safe to tell, and that includes people in the industry and outside the industry," she said.
That gap in available resources is what prompted Rubeling to launch Advisor Transition Services. "I thought that's what advisors would be Googling – and it turns out to be true," she said, explaining that many of those who found her hadn't made any decisions yet and were doing basic exploratory research about their options.
Portability is a related hurdle, particularly for advisors moving from more captive models to independent ones.
With a wide range of business structures available – from standalone RIAs to aggregator platforms – Rubeling says many advisors don't appreciate the range of alternatives that exist, or the complexities involved in moving a book of business from one model to another.
From Rubeling's POV, the expectation-setting problem has gotten worse in recent years, driven in part by the growth of aggregator RIAs backed by big money. These firms have hired aggressively on the business development side, she said, but the people making the pitch are often not the same people managing the transition.
"There's definitely a lot of omitted information in some of these conversations that business development representatives are having with these advisors ... purely because they're not the ones doing the transitions," Rubeling said. "I think that in terms of transitions and in terms of decision making, there's a seesaw effect here."
The disconnect, she said, isn't necessarily deliberate – salespeople may believe what they're telling advisors, but lack the operational knowhow to verify it. The result is that advisors often reach the operations stage and discover the process looks different from what they were told.
Evans, who has more than 20 years of experience in firm growth and development, said the challenge also extends to what happens after an advisor arrives at an open-architecture firm. With so many available options, the freedom itself becomes a source of friction.
"We don't tell them what to eat. We help curate better where they should go first," he told InvestmentNews.
On the operations side, Rubeling said the mechanics of moving accounts have come a long way. "I don't think I've used a UPS envelope in five years," she said, crediting the widespread adoption of e-signature and document-filling platforms.
But the explosion of fintech tools has introduced its own complexity. Rubeling pointed to the authoritative Kitces advisor technology map – which at last check catalogs more than 500 names across five color-coded categories – as Exhibit A. With a growing number of single-purpose tools on the market, advisors now face difficult decisions about what they actually need, which solutions play nice together, and whether joining a firm for bundled pricing is worth the trade-off.
She argued this tension is part of why aggregator RIAs have gained traction: they offer a packaged answer. But that doesn't mean it's the right or most cost-effective one for every advisor. At Rossby, Rubeling said the goal is to give partner advisors enough information and support to make their own technology decisions without being overwhelmed by the choices – or locked into a single stack.
Evans was direct about where artificial intelligence fits into the picture. "Any firm that isn't doing AI already or hasn't been is now probably more than a year behind," he said.
He said Rossby is building an AI-backed, white-label transition tool through its ROffice platform, designed to help advisors move between firms more efficiently. But the emphasis, he said, isn't on filling out forms.
"What you need to do is collect your data, clean your data, arrange your data, get it on proper tables, make sure that it's searchable," he said.
Rubeling knows the angst of form-filling all too well, having once had to print out paper forms by the stack just to satisfy custodians operating with legacy systems. While things have come far along with broader adoption of DocuSign and other e-signature platforms, she encourages advisors and would-be independent RIAs not to hyperfixate on the form of, well, the form.
"That's just the way it has to be done right now, but it's not always going to be that way," Rubeling said. "Let's focus on process rather than the physical representation of the data."
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