The breakaway economy.

In 2014 the independent and hybrid RIA channels held about 21 percent of US wealth-management assets. By 2024 it was 27 percent. Cerulli projects roughly a third by 2027, on par with or above the wirehouse channel that ran the industry for a century. The force behind it is not a fad. It is arithmetic.

That is not a rotation. It is the industry restructuring in front of everyone, and the crossover is close enough to date.

The trend line

Independent RIAs compounded assets at nearly 11 percent a year over the past decade, while the wirehouse channel grew total assets but shed advisor headcount at roughly one percent a year. In 2025 alone, about nine percent of all financial advisors, some $3.1 trillion in client assets, changed firms. Charles Schwab's RIA custody unit now holds more than $1.36 trillion and still adds net-new assets at a double-digit annual clip. Cerulli projects that by 2028, one in three US advisors will operate inside an RIA.

Why the top of the market left, not just the middle

Framing the shift as "advisors want a higher payout" is true and useless. Payout differentials explain why a middle-tier advisor moves. They do not explain why the top of the market is leaving. One force does. For most of wealth management's history, being a wirehouse producer was the wealth-building path: build a book, get paid on the book, retire on the book. In the last decade the exit multiples on independent RIAs, routinely eight to sixteen times EBITDA and near six times revenue for a well-run firm, turned owning the practice into the wealth-building path instead.

A senior producer at a wirehouse builds recurring income that stops when they stop. A senior producer inside an RIA they own builds an asset that trades at a premium multiple at sale. Across a fifteen-to-twenty-five-year horizon, the equity difference dwarfs the annual comp difference. None of this makes staying wrong. For a practice built on the brand, the platform, and the upfront capital, the wirehouse is the better economics; the shift simply made ownership a real option where there was not one, so the top of the market now faces a genuine choice rather than a default. The full decision, category by category, is its own piece: see Wirehouse vs RIA.

The breakaway economy is not a story about firms getting worse, or about one channel winning. It is a story about ownership becoming a real option that the arithmetic now supports for some practices. Whether it fits yours is a separate question, and the honest answer is not always yes.