For years, the wealth management industry has steered by a single north star: moving “upstream.” The logic is simple: To boost profitability and avoid commoditization, firms must focus on the complex, lucrative market of high and ultrahigh net worth clients.
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Experts often argue that the largest firms — those with the means to offer one-stop shop service to their wealthiest clients — are best positioned to execute on that strategy. And at first glance, that appears to be the case.
Among the industry’s biggest RIAs (those with more than $10 billion in AUM), the typical firm boasts an average client size of roughly $13 million, a figure that dwarfs the rest of the industry.
But a Financial Planning analysis shows that despite their scale, the industry’s giants are falling behind smaller peers in their efforts to boost their average client wealth.
Over the past five years, large and midsize firms saw average client wealth rise alongside the market. Giant firms followed a different strategy, growing assets primarily by adding more clients rather than increasing wealth per client. As a result, the exclusive segment remains dominant by scale, but shows slow progress in raising average client size.
Here is how the divergence breaks down.
Experts offer different explanations for that figure.
Elliot Dornbusch, founder and CEO of CV Advisors, a nearly $13 billion RIA based in Aventura, Florida, attributed the slower growth in assets per client to the “law of large numbers.”
“When you have families that are $100 million and above, it’s hard to increase the account size significantly,” Dornbusch said. “But when you’re managing $1 billion, and you get one family that is oversized, your percentage increase per client is more significant.”
Since 2021, CV Advisors has increased its average per-client AUM by just under 9%, slightly below the median for its peer group. But the firm’s $96 million average client size reflects the high starting point Dornbusch described.
Savant, EP Wealth buck the trend
Among the two dozen firms in the giants group, a few stand as exceptions to the rule.
Firms like Savant Wealth Management and EP Wealth Advisors have managed to increase their per-client AUM by 42% and 37%, respectively.
Kevin Hrdlicka, Savant’s head of wealth, described the firm’s growth over recent years as a product of service expansion and strategic partnerships.
“We’ve observed that much of the industry still delivers a standardized advice experience. Simply saying you serve high net worth or ultrahigh net worth clients doesn’t make it so,” Hrdlicka said. “In our opinion, moving upmarket is more of a personalization decision. At Savant, we serve mass affluent, high net worth and ultrahigh net worth clients, but we don’t treat them as one audience. We’re intentionally segmenting our business and building depth in specific niches and other areas, such as tax and estate planning, where we know clients need help. … We believe that’s how personalization becomes real, and that’s what drives organic growth beyond buzzwords.”
At EP Wealth, shrewd acquisitions have also played a key role in improving average client wealth, according to the firm’s managing director of wealth management services, Erin Voisin.
“That is something we’ve been really thoughtful about. We have said no to firms if we feel like their average client is not in line with ours, where it’s just not going to be a good fit, whereas maybe some of our peers don’t feel that way,” Voisin said.
“We were talking with a firm [where] 70% or 80% of their clients were below a million, and we’re trying to target a million-plus,” Voisin said. “We’re like, ‘This is not a good fit for us.’ … So we said no to that, but another large RIA aggregator said yes to them.”
Voisin said decisions like those can boost a firm’s overall book of business, even as per-client AUM growth remains limited — a pattern seen in the data.
Firms like Aspiriant, a $15.5 billion RIA in Los Angeles, illustrate that trend. Over the past five years, the firm’s client count has risen nearly 27%, to roughly 2,227. Meanwhile, average assets per client have declined by more than 15%, from $8.2 million to just under $7 million. Aspiriant did not respond to a request for comment.
Such client growth can boost certain metrics in the short term, but experts like Hrdlicka caution it may create challenges later.
“We believe firms that rely too heavily on scale without specialization risk offering a more commoditized experience,” he said. “In our view, long-term growth comes from relevance and trust, as well as being able to support clients as their needs become more complex. It’s not just about volume. Firms that fail to differentiate may find growth harder, regardless of the client segment they target.”
MethodologyForm ADV data was sourced from the SEC’s Investment Adviser Information Reports for the periods of December 2021 and December 2025. The dataset is limited to firms appearing on the 2025 RIA Leaders list compiled by COMPLY (full selection criteria available here). Total client counts were derived from Item 5.D of Form ADV. For statistical consistency, client counts reported as “Fewer than 5” were imputed as a value of 2.
