The RIA M&A market has spent the better part of four years setting records, but two investment bankers who work inside those deals every day say the run is built on borrowed time.
Ryan Kaminski and Christopher Gent, co-founders of Green Sail Capital Partners, argue that the multiples fueling today's wave of RIA consolidation are propped up by a form of financial arbitrage that cannot hold indefinitely. The upshot, in their view, is that sellers who wait too long could leave real money on the table.
"We think at some point, probably towards the end of the decade, there's going to be a couple of events that are going to result in a decline in these record multiples," Kaminski told InvestmentNews.
Drawing perspective from across their careers in investment banking, which started outside the wealth space before they met at LPL and eventually started their own sell-side consulting firm, Gent and Kaminski said today's market remains extremely active.
"It's certainly still a hot market as of 2026 in terms of new entrants and people interested in getting in," Kaminski said, pointing to the influence of continuing demand from private equity firms.
The typical PE playbook, Kaminski explained, involves building a "platform company" that then goes out and acquires smaller firms. That model is currently being deployed to great effect by Carson Group, which has backing from Bain Capital, as well as Wealth Enhancement, whch is reportedly at the center of a PE bidding war that includes Bain Capital and Carlyle.
According to Kaminski, new entrants are hoping to jump in and copy that formula, which he says is sustaining aggressive bidding even as fundamentals shift.
At the center of Green Sail's thesis is a simple observation about how consolidators price deals. Kaminski pointed to the bullish logic of "multiple arbitrage," where buyers trading at roughly 20 times EBITDA in the private markets are willing to pay top dollar for an acquisition in hopes of still capturing a spread.
"Everybody is thinking 'We're trading at 20 times EBITDA, we'll buy for 12. And that's okay,' " Kaminski said.
The reality might not be so rosy, if deals outside the wealth space are any indication. He pointed to a robotics and logistics deal Green Sail advised on last November, where a best-in-class operator that sold into Amazon and Walmart still commanded only about 8.5 times EBITDA.
For Gent, the headlines on multiples in RIA deals mask a wide dispersion in actual outcomes. While reported medians hover in the range of 12 times EBITDA, he said Green Sail has seen deals close anywhere from 7 times to 18 times, depending on the caliber of the brokers and matchmakers involved as well as the specifics of the firm being sold.
"That's a pretty wide range," Gent said. "That just goes to our thesis that there's a lot of value in hiring the right representation."
Some of the biggest actiive RIA buyers might be starting to sober up after years of bingeing. In the latest RIA M&A Deal Book Report by Devoe & Company, none of the consolidators surveyed said they expect valuations to rise over the next six months, a meaningfully bearish turn from last year when 8% anticipated increases. Meanwhile, 18% now expect valuations to decline, up from 7% a year earlier, and nearly three-quarters of respondents said the gap between what sellers expect and what buyers are willing to pay is widening.
Among other factors, Green Sail's founders say an aging population of financial advisors has been delaying retirement sales because record-high equity markets keep making their businesses more valuable each year. Once that bull run ends, Kaminski pictures a world where things will change quickly. "There's just going to be a massive supply influx," he said, while buyer demand stays comparatively fixed – a combination that should push prices down.
There's also the potential of a public listing by one of the industry's largest consolidators. While it remains to be seen who will be the next Focus Financial, Kaminski doubts any IPO would be as successful as sponsors hope. If a public listing values a major consolidator below the roughly 25 times EBITDA assumption embedded in private valuations – compared to Amazon's current multiple of about 15 times EBITDA – "every other multiple has to correct."
"I want to call it a house of cards," Gent said, noting that private equity firms tend to copy one another's strategies and underwrite growth assumptions – often around 15% annually – that depend on markets continuing to climb. "All it takes is for the market to have one bad year, and all of their financial models will collapse."
Rather than a sudden crash akin to the 2008 housing crisis, Kaminski expects a slow burn in expectations. "Think of it as a slight decay," he said, describing a scenario in which the median multiple might drift from 11.5 times EBITDA to 10.5, then 10, over successive years – a trend buyers and sellers might only recognize once it's in the rearview mirror.
The most urgent implication for RIA principals, according to Kaminski, has to do with deal structure rather than the multiple itself. Most private equity-backed transactions are not paid entirely in cash; typically, he sees 25% delivered as equity in the acquiring firm, which usually stays illiquid for three to five years until the buyer has its own liquidity event.
That structure, Kaminski said, means advisor-owners who sell to consolidators are effectively making a second bet on where valuations will sit years down the road. "If I'm holding stock when I sell, I would rather sell today, get the really high cash amount and still be able to sell my stock before multiples come way down," he said.
For Gent, that "second bite of the apple" can be more financially significant than sellers realize, potentially equaling our outsizing the initial cash payment. A hypothetical firm that sells for $10 million and receives 25% of stock in the firm that bought them, he said, would oftentimes be in for a "very, very meaningfull" windfall down the road – assuming the acquiring firm can continue to grow.
"I know it's like paper, so people don't value it necessarily like it's cash," he said. "But you're getting your first $10 million, and then in three to five years you're getting another $10 million."
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