The 10 fastest-growing RIAs, excluding the M&A dealmakers

In a competitive industry like wealth management in which copying is a quick way to catch up with rivals, many registered investment advisors would love to mimic these firms’ growth.

The 10 fastest-expanding advisory firms multiplied their number of clients and assets under management by factors of two or more, according to a July 27 analysis of SEC-registered RIAs by financial advisor lead generation and client matchmaking service SmartAsset. The rankings exclude firms that made acquisitions between March 2019 and March 2022, stripping them out of debatable and often-controversial criteria surrounding the relative size of firms in the industry. Each RIA was scored based on their one- and three-year gains in clients and AUM.

With its list extending to the top 50 RIAs netting the largest gains over the past three years, SmartAsset sought “to isolate organic growth” with the data, said Susannah Snider, a CFP who is the firm’s managing editor of financial education.

“It’s always helpful to have a birds-eye view of the wealth management industry, including gaining familiarity with the names and locations of fast-growing firms,” Snider said in an email. “Advisors may not be familiar with every name on this list, but they may want to get to know who these firms are and what they do.”

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The data comes with caveats. First, the appreciation of stock values over the past three years has driven much of the industry’s record levels of assets. Second, new financial advisor recruits usually bring most of their clients and AUM when they change firms. The strictest industry purists count recruiting and market gains separately from “organic” development.

Additionally, the study doesn’t cover what has driven the advancement of these RIAs, which can often involve variables like the choice of a vendor that frees up advisors to focus more on clients and prospects and less on administrative tasks or clunky technology. 

Take a firm like Interactive Brokers as an example. Although it started as a market maker brokerage for options traders, its RIA custodian arm has reached more than 23,700 client accounts and $52 billion in assets after roughly two decades in the business, according to Steve Sanders, Interactive Brokers’ executive vice president of marketing and product development. Better tech enables RIAs to scale up more quickly, he said.

“We're low-cost because we fully automate everything for the advisor,” he said, referring to software that makes transfers, adding new products and a full view of a client’s portfolio across firms much simpler for practices.

Those are the tools that wealth managers and other advisory firms are seeking out as they operate in an industry populated mostly by small firms while dominated by giants. Interestingly, the same firm as last year came out on top of SmartAsset’s list.

Scroll down our slideshow to see the top 10 fastest-expanding RIAs. For other data features about the size of RIAs, see: Schwab’s latest annual benchmarking study; a snapshot of the record numbers of advisory firms and AUM; and a look at why advisors and industry experts say ranking RIAs is difficult.

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Note: The rankings and all of the data come from an analysis of SEC Form ADV filings by SmartAsset based on an equally weighted criteria measuring the one- and three-year percentages of change in the number of client accounts and assets under management. The company tracked 728 RIAs after removing any that had completed known M&A deals, showed regulatory disclosures on their records or had fewer than $500 million in AUM. All data is current for each year as of March, the month that RIAs must file their updated Form ADVs.