Advisor Movement Soared 16% in 2025
2025 was a banner year for advisor recruiting, with 11,172 experienced advisors changing firms, up 16% from 2024, when 9,615 advisors moved, according to the latest Advisor Transition Report from Diamond Consultants.
Last year’s report predicted that advisor movement would surpass 10,000 in 2025, and the recruiting firm was correct. Attrition was meaningfully higher in 2025 than in the previous three years, when it hovered between 9,000 and 10,000 each year.
Overall advisor movement was likely greater than that since Diamond Consultants only tracks movement among “experienced advisors,” those with three or more years in the industry.
The report counted 54 $1 billion-plus teams that transitioned in 2025, 29 of which were from wirehouses.
If you look at the raw data, the largest number of moves involved independent advisors going to another independent firm or model, and those tend to be smaller moves, said Jason Diamond, president at Diamond Consultants. But the industry also saw some of the biggest and most sophisticated teams transition last year.
Take OpenArc Corporate Advisory, for example. This was a $129 billion Atlanta-based team that left Merrill Lynch last year to start its own RIA with support from Dynasty Financial Partners.
A confluence of factors impacted advisor movement in 2025, including acquisitions, Diamond said. He pointed to LPL Financial’s acquisition of Commonwealth Financial Network as the most significant deal that spurred advisor movement last year.
“On both sides of the acquisition, there’s always some attrition as a result of that,” he said. “So we’ve seen that as a factor contributing to high levels of attrition.”
That acquisition then caused many of the larger independent firms to raise their transition deals, heightening movement in that channel.
Another factor was the massive attrition we saw last year at UBS, on the heels of compensation plan changes and what Diamond calls “non-advisor-friendly” policies, such as cost-cutting and margin pressures. UBS lost 318 experienced advisors and a headcount gain of 75, according to the report.
As for what recruiting might look like going forward, Diamond said he doesn’t expect this to be the new trend line. He expects attrition to remain in that 9,000-10,000 a year range.
But he said the next wave of movement will be with private equity firms and private-equity-backed RIAs.
“Private equity firms and private equity-backed RIAs are going to start cracking the code on how to invest in, buy, recruit, and acquire wirehouse teams directly,” he said. “The old thinking and the current thinking for most advisors is there’s a two-step process. Step one: You go independent and launch your independent business. Step two: At some point down the line, you sell that business, probably to a private equity-backed RIA. A prediction is that you could cut out that middle step, potentially, sell your business directly to the private equity-backed RIA straight from the wirehouse model.”
Artificial intelligence will also be a driving force for advisor movement going forward, as advisors consider firms’ capabilities in this area, Diamond predicted. And the firm expects many advisors to monetize their practices amid the threat AI poses to the financial advice profession.
“Anytime there’s this perceived threat to the status quo, I think it begs the question of, is it going to make advisors who—not for every advisor, not for an advisor who’s got 40 years of runway and he’s growing like crazy, but for advisors who are already kind of on the fence about potentially monetizing or taking chips off the table—is this going to be kind of the impetus where they’re going to be like, ‘there is risk to me not doing something in the next three years I should get while the getting is good,’” Diamond said.