FA’ S 2026 RIA SURVEY & RANKING

BY EVAN SIMONOFF

ARELY HAVE ALL THE STARS ALIGNED TO shine on a profession and create an environment as favorable as the universe facing financial advisors today. The demographic and financial market dynamics underpinning the advisory business look so auspicious that an estimated 300 qualified buyers, mostly private equity firms, are banging on the doors and trying to acquire a piece of it.

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, wealth has been created at an exponential pace as U. S. equities have produced double-digit returns for almost two decades.

The world of wealth is a different place today. Financial advisors who once viewed clients with $ 10 million as outliers no longer do in a K-shaped economy.

People on the upper end of the K are thriving. A recent analysis of Federal Reserve data by Princeton economics professor Owen Zidar estimated there are 430,000 families with $ 30 million or more. Today, ordinary investors and sophisticated regulators alike may struggle to define what fiduciary advice is, but 77 million Americans, more than 20 % of the population, are using it in one way or another, according to the Investment Adviser Association.

For the RIA profession, the biggest challenge is finding young talent to meet the need for financial advice. It’ s clear that this demand will exceed the number of new advisors, and fintech companies are racing to help fill in the service gaps— creating AI tools to make advisors more productive while also empowering do-ityourself investors to make purportedly smarter decisions.

The business must also ask itself how much of its success can be attributed to a superior business model and how much is driven by powerful tailwinds from a bull market. In conversations with custodians who know RIA firms intimately, one often hears the critique that the organic growth of advisory firms is anemic and too many of them are coasting on market tailwinds.

But the generalizations fail to capture what’ s happening in a profession of 15,000 firms. Take Mission Wealth of Santa Barbara, Calif., whose two founders were thinking about succession planning shortly after they opened their doors in the 1990s. Both of them were under 40 years old at the time.

When the names of the 15 or 20 so-called national firms are discussed, Mission Wealth’ s name rarely surfaces. Yet over the last three years it has managed to achieve 17 % annual organic growth( factoring out acquisitions and market gains) as assets have swelled from $ 5 billion in 2022 to $ 17 billion now, according to Dannell Stuart, the firm’ s president and partner.

Last year, the firm took on a minority investment from Boston-based PE firm Great Hill Partners. Shortly thereafter, John Wernz came on board as chief growth officer to enhance the firm’ s digital marketing. He also serves as its entrepreneur-in-residence, a role in which he benefits from having worked a 13-year stint at Wealth Enhancement Group, one of the industry’ s mega-firms and most active acquirers.

To clients and prospects, a lot of RIA websites“ look alike,” Stuart says. The firm spent a lot of time“ talking to stakeholders and then creating an online welcome mat,” she adds.

Executives at big RIAs can typically move between their firms with ease, but for the advisors on the ground it’ s become a very different story. Though courts increasingly are disregarding non-compete agreements, that isn’ t preventing firms from su-

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