Wealth management firms moving upmarket are running into a staffing problem as the specialized services wealthy families expect are the costliest to build in-house, pushing many practices are renting that expertise rather than hiring for it.
According to new research from Cerulli Associates, tax planning is the service most often outsourced by high-net-worth practices, cited by 55% of respondents in its polling. Trust administration follows at 40%, then risk management and insurance at 39% and estate planning at 37%.
On average, high-net-worth practices outsource three to four services, according to the Boston-based research firm.
“The services most likely to make the biggest difference also are operationally the most burdensome to deliver and, as a result, are the costliest to take to market,” said Chayce Horton, an associate director at Cerulli.
The pull upmarket follows the money. Cerulli estimates that households with more than $5 million in financial assets held 57% of U.S. household financial wealth at the end of 2025, up from 43% in 2019. That shift has put pressure on firms that want to compete for high-net-worth and ultra-wealthy clients to broaden what they offer.
Cerulli’s data suggests team-based practices are better placed to move to higher wealth markets. By its polling, ensemble practices report an average client relationship of $2.3 million, more than double the roughly $980,000 at solo practices. They also tend to manage about $330 million on average, against $95 million for solo practices, while being more than four times as likely to employ specialized staff (37% of ensembles, versus 8% of solo practices).
Building that bench is the hard part. Three-quarters of practice management professionals surveyed by Cerulli called hiring quality staff a major challenge, while nearly two-thirds (63%) said the same about training junior advisors, recruiting established advisors and offering competitive compensation. Only 29% of advisor practices employ more than one junior advisor, and 20% still operate solo.
Horton said firm size should determine how much a firm builds versus buys.
“Scale largely dictates where that line falls: large enterprises can support a deeper internal resource pool, mid-enterprise firms tend to formalize integrations or acquire capabilities outright, and firms below that tier are best served holding to a core specialty and partnering or finding value in the marketplace,” he said.
Cerulli puts mid-enterprise firms at roughly $5 billion to $30 billion in assets.
High-net-worth clients recognize the value of services beyond typical planning and investment management, often paying separately for those added capabilities. When asked what services they often bill via a separate fee, HNW practices were most likely to cite trust services (54%) and tax work (44%).
The majority of independent firms have already widened their menus. In Charles Schwab’s latest RIA Benchmarking Study, nearly nine-tenths of RIAs with $250 million or more in assets said they offer tax planning and strategy (88%) and charitable planning (87%), and almost three-quarters cited estate planning (73%) and family education (73%). Rather than billing separately, most independent RIAs in Schwab's survey research fold those extra services into the asset management fee.
Staffing up is also a top priority among indie RIAs, according to Schwab; 75% of the firms it polled hired in 2025 and the same share plan to hire in 2026. At current growth rates, it projects the RIA industry will need more than 70,000 new staff over five years, though that estimate doesn't take attrition, retirements, new firms and AI productivity gains into consideration.
"As the wealth management industry continues to move upmarket and the ecosystem of third-party specialists expands, firms will need to carefully evaluate which capabilities they should build, buy, or access through strategic partnerships," Cerulli's Horton said.
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