With an “astonishingly high number” of advisory teams switching firms, it is “a great time to be a financial advisor, and no one is ever ‘stuck,'” according to a new study.
Processing Content
The number of advisors with at least three years of experience who left a brokerage jumped 16% to 11,172 in 2025 — the highest total since recruiting firm Diamond Consultants began tracking the moves in 2022 for its annual “Financial Advisor Transition Report.” Morgan Stanley, LPL Financial, Raymond James and RBC Wealth Management were the “big winners,” while UBS and Osaic “suffered heavy attrition at the other end of the spectrum,” according to the study, which was released last month.
However, the draw of independence, aggressive recruiting and M&A offers and the growing ranks of suitors could alter those trends quickly.
For instance, LPL’s $2.7 billion acquisition of Commonwealth Financial Network last year has prompted rivals to ramp up their recruiting offers and poach hundreds of advisors ahead of their technical onboarding with the company’s new parent firm later this year. Registered investment advisory firms or hybrid RIAs, technology and services vendors, or private equity investors in wealth management companies could shift the balance in their own favor, or lose market share to legacy giants and other competitors vying for top talent.
READ MORE: LPL’s Mariner Advisor Network deal fuels already hot year for RIA M&A
A rising tide lifts some boats
With “advisors moving in every channel” of wealth management, LPL’s Commonwealth deal and the advisor compensation changes at UBS last year “had major ripple effects” in recruiting, said Jason Diamond, president of the firm and lead author of the report.
“The net trends, there’s no question they illustrate a pretty clear picture. Movement remains incredibly high — arguably a record high,” he said.
At the same time, recruiters like Diamond and Jodie Papike of Cross-Search say that the autonomy of independence and the increasing types and ranges of support pitched by recruiters will continue to be a magnet for departing teams. Beyond that “consistent trend,” consolidation, acquisitions and administrative frustrations fueled many moves last year, Papike said.
“I saw service coming up in almost every conversation that I was having,” she said. “I think, because so many firms were really falling short of high levels of service, that created a lot of movement as well.”
The large numbers of advisors on the move suggest that “accomplished pros looked at everything they had built and decided the cost of staying had become too high,” Shannon Spotswood, CEO of Vestavia Hills, Alabama-based hybrid RIA firm RFG Advisory said in a LinkedIn post about the Diamond report.
The report’s data “quantified something I have believed for a long time,” she wrote. “The advisors who moved were running toward the ability to serve clients with their own special CX and values, grow without artificial constraints and build a business that accrues value on their family’s balance sheet.”
READ MORE: 6 marketing moves to shift RIAs into growth mode
Who’s up, who’s down and how that could change
Diamond’s report aggregated the numbers from private data firms like Discovery Data, AdvizorPro and FINTRX that scrape figures from FINRA BrokerCheck and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, as well as industry news reports. As a result the report’s data includes advisors who changed firms due to an M&A deal, but not those whose registration changed from affiliates of the same parent firm in an internal consolidation or move.
As in prior years’ studies, independent firms generated the largest increase in advisor headcount (465) of any brokerage channel, followed by regional firms (97), boutiques (-260) and the four wirehouses (-302). The independent brokerages outpaced other channels for three consecutive years. But the margin narrowed last year, indicating that RIAs with no FINRA registration are likely also eating into their gains. Since Diamond’s report focuses on advisors who have at least three years in the field, the firms with the largest training programs, such as the wirehouses and Edward Jones, usually end up with the highest net losses.
Among the wirehouses, Morgan Stanley’s gain of 111 advisors and Wells Fargo’s addition of 85 led the channel, with UBS (-243) and Merrill (-255) on the losing end. But the report said it is “certainly not writing the final chapter” on UBS, which has some of the largest and most productive advisor teams in the industry and “a world-class, elite private wealth brand.” A public cost-cutting campaign led UBS to try to improve profitability margins by tightening its advisor compensation grid, only to scale back the shifts to a certain extent.
The firm “currently faces one of the most unhappy and frustrated advisor bases in recent memory,” the report stated. “In fairness to UBS, it wasn’t long ago that Merrill and Wells Fargo were in the so-called ‘crosshairs,’ facing a litany of bad press and negative sentiment. It’s not impossible to imagine a future where UBS management ‘cleans house’ and completely overhauls its wealth management strategy.”
At regional and boutique firms, Raymond James and Associates (118), Rockefeller Financial (80) and RBC (40) drove the biggest net increases to their headcounts, while Janney (-1), Oppenheimer (-18) and Edward Jones (-80) sustained the biggest losses.
“Edward Jones has added many advisors and continues to operate one of the most scaled wealth management franchises on the planet,” the report said. “But the platform limitations and cultural challenges at the firm have led many experienced advisors to pursue change in recent years. In our view, the most significant event in the recent trajectory of Edward Jones was the 2022 departure of one of the firm’s top advisors, Jennifer Marcontell [to Ameriprise], showing that it was possible and even exciting for Jones advisors to move their books.”
In the independent brokerage channel, LPL (2,112), Cetera Financial Group (1,963), Cambridge Investment Research (206) and Raymond James Financial Services (204) led the way. Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network (-1), Commonwealth (-186) and Osaic (-364) came in at the bottom. Industry observers “knew there was going to be some departures and some pain” as the former Advisor Group network combined eight brokerages into one over the past several years, so Diamond doesn’t “expect that attrition rate to continue,” he said.
Moreover, Osaic and other independent rivals like Raymond James, Kestra Financial, Cambridge and Cetera have been recruiting ex-Commonwealth teams. While LPL “has been the single biggest recruiting machine since the inception of this report,” the majority of “the noise associated with the Commonwealth announcement” is largely behind it now, the report said.
“In that sense, 2026 is an important year for LPL,” the report said. “Will they re-capture the strong recruiting momentum from 2024? Will they re-enter the M&A market? Love them or hate them, LPL’s position as the category leader is cemented, and the benefits of their scale from a pricing and platform perspective are formidable. The investment analyst community can debate whether LPL has ‘overpaid’ for advisors, but the reality for advisors themselves (both at the firm and elsewhere) is that LPL’s aggressive recruiting is good for the industry.”
READ MORE: What to expect in advisor pay in 2026
The outlook for competitive recruiting fights
In other words, LPL’s deal added to the competitive race for talent that is prompting ever-increasing recruiting offers and substantial “sunset deals” aimed at retaining teams through looming advisor retirements and successions. That’s why advisors are doing so well right now. And the report identified 54 moves by teams with at least $1 billion in client assets in 2025.
But their trails to a new firm don’t always lead to the same destinations. While admitting that the firm was tooting its own horn a bit since Diamond Consultants “was fortunate to play a part in advising on the transition,” the report pointed to the case study of a giant ex-Merrill team’s launch last year of Open Arc Corporate Advisory, an Atlanta-based RIA assisted by the Dynasty Financial Partners platform and led by a team that managed $129 billion with the wirehouse. That independent RIA structure sent an important signal to the industry, Diamond said.
“The natural inclination for bigger advisors is to say, ‘I’m too complex to move,’ or, ‘I’m too big of a book of business to move,'” he said, citing the old adage that, where there’s a will, there’s a way. “I think it’s pretty darn telling the direction they went. Had they gone to a W-2 firm, you could imagine the size of the check that they would have been in for, and they consciously chose not to do that.”
Similarly, Papike cautioned that those big offers typically target firms that derive most of their revenue from recurring advisory fees. Advisors consider many more factors besides the amount of the potential bonus or purchase price when they’re thinking about leaving a firm.
“It used to be that going independent was a really big thing and advisors didn’t really understand what it took to do that. That’s not really the case anymore,” she said. “There are still a lot of really great firms that can’t get to that high-water offer that are having success.”
