The 10 brokerages that added the most reps in the past 10 years

Financial advisors' movements from one firm to another show that many opt for destinations that aren't considered independent.

That suggests the continuing record growth of registered investment advisory firms that are seen as independent is playing out just as the brokerage firms commonly thought to be losing out are actually adding teams to their ranks from other firms, according to the below rankings shared with Financial Planning by ISS Market Intelligence from its Discovery Data MarketPro solution. LPL Financial, an independent firm, took the top spot on the list, but the next five companies are wirehouses or other employee brokerages: Bank of America's Merrill, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo Advisors and Fidelity Investments.

To be sure, the list tracks only brokerage switching. So it doesn't cover advisors at RIAs who drop their FINRA registration after leaving brokerages or never working for them in the first place. Regardless, as a dataset spanning 89,574 moves from 2014 through 2023, the figures reflect which 10 brokerages added the most registered representatives from their rivals at a time in the profession in which the meaning of financial advisor independence is up for debate.

Each advisor or team must ask themselves, "Where are you on that conformity scale?" said     Abby Salameh, the chief growth officer of Birmingham, Alabama-based hybrid RIA firm RFG Advisory. The choices demonstrate a range, with a fully autonomous RIA structure on one side, corporate brokerage employee status on the other and the burgeoning number of aggregator firms "somewhere in the middle" as an option for advisors leaving their current firm, she said.  

"There are so many options now. There are so many different flavors of independence," Salameh said. "You want to leave, but do you want to fully conform to an independent platform where you take on their name and you take on all of their back-office support and you take on their investments and their branding and their way of doing things?"

Every advisor may develop a different way to tell that it's time to go to a new firm or, follow the path taken by planners like Kevin Thompson, the CEO of Fort Worth, Texas-based RIA firm 9I Capital Group, who left a brokerage to start his own company last year. Advisors need to gain "a foothold in the traditional financial sense" before going independent, Thompson said.

"When I got my CFP, I knew it was time to go," he said. "What am I bringing in? What is the overriding company getting? What is my compensation? When those numbers started making sense, that's when it was time to leave."

Despite the continuing consolidation, advisors are fielding more recruiting calls than ever from possible investors, buyers, RIA service providers and, yes, brokerages seeking to do business with them. 

In order to make the right decision for them, advisors should do some "soul-searching" to identify their "non-negotiables," and other factors that are more "nice-to-haves" at a new firm, according to Marty Bicknell, CEO of Overland Park, Kansas-based RIA aggregator Mariner Wealth Advisors.

"Economics are important, but I wouldn't let that drive the bus. I would really take a step back and do an inventory of what's truly important," he said. "There are similarities, but it's really different for every advisor."

If advisors are considering selling their firm, they ought to think through which potential buyers fit their goals for the client experience, advisors' professional development and their compensation, said Peter Mallouk, CEO of Overland Park, Kansas-based RIA aggregator Creative Planning.

"What do you value with your clients, then what do you value with your team?" Mallouk said. "If you just take those three things, you're going to eliminate 90% of the marketplace. … You're going to find yourself with a very small pool of potential buyers."

Many advisors are staying put rather than carrying out such a process, though. For Shirl Penney, the CEO of St. Petersburg, Florida-based RIA platform Dynasty Financial Partners, that's a product of the "siloed brokerage construct" that created the wealth management industry decades ago. 

"A lot of it has to do with inertia," he said. "A lot of advisors, if not most, are very frustrated with the old-school revenue model, but inertia is very real. If you were to start the whole industry over it wouldn't look like it looks today."

Advisors must "look at the scope of what you want to do" when thinking about changing firms, said Tom Rippberger, managing partner of New York-based advisory and brokerage network Affiliated Advisors. Since they "have more choice than they've ever had," they need to "find the best fit for yourself" at any type of firm, he said.

"There's just a lot you need to understand," Rippberger said. "So if you're thinking about independence, talk to people who have done it and find out, do you really want to go down that avenue and take care of those decisions, because all of those take away from meeting with your client and taking care of them."

Scroll down the slideshow for the rankings of the 10 wealth management firms that added the most brokers from other firms in the past decade — a list compiled for FP by ISS Market Intelligence from its Discovery Data MarketPro solution. 

To read the feature story taking a deep dive into the shifting concept of advisor independence, "Independence? It depends," click here. To watch a live Leaders Forum discussion about how advisor independence is changing, click here. And, for a look at nearly three dozen views of independence from advisors, executives, entrepreneurs and other experts, follow this link.