For the first time, the combined client assets involved with the 10 largest moves and M&A deals in the independent brokerage channel of wealth management have surpassed $1 trillion.
Financial Planning’s ranking of the largest recruiting wins, external investments and other merger deals among independent financial advisors who use a brokerage spans 7,476 advisors and $1.06 trillion in client assets. As a measure of the sheer size of such shifts, the number of client assets involved with the top 10 soared by nearly three times the total on last year’s list. And the number of announcements compiled by Financial Planning involving advisors, teams and firms with at least $1 billion in client assets more than doubled to a record 83 in 2025 so far.
In the independent channels of wealth management this year, LPL Financial’s acquisition of Commonwealth Financial Network and an ex-Merrill team’s launch of OpenArc Corporate Advisory stood apart as “seminal, because the impacts to the industry will be felt for a long time,” said Shelby Nicholl, founder of advisor recruiting and consulting firm Muriel Consulting. As a registered investment advisory firm that opened with the assistance of Dynasty Financial Partners but without any brokerage, the latter move wasn’t eligible for the list below. Regardless, the two deals alone altered the movement of independent advisors, she said.
“LPL buying Commonwealth feels like a dramatic shift in the industry landscape — it took away an option that was very unique,” Nicholl said, citing the accompanying impact of OpenArch out of a team that had managed $129 billion at Merrill. “It resets what is a normal transition in the RIA space. Nothing is too big to go RIA because of OpenArc. Nothing is too complex, because of OpenArc and Dynasty and what they’ve done.”
To see the rankings of the largest recruiting moves and M&A deals involving independent broker-dealers in 2025 in terms of client assets, scroll down the slideshow. For last year’s list, click here. And find the rankings for previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020.
Notes: The below figures reflect those given at the time of recruiting and M&A announcements by independent wealth management firms; these firms don’t always disclose every single deal or all the relevant details, and they cite numbers that may not be verifiable in every case. To be included on the list, the announcement needed to involve a team either leaving, joining or staying in the independent brokerage channel through a recruiting move or M&A transaction that closed in 2025.
Moves and transactions involving only employee brokerages whose advisors are direct W-2 employees or registered investment advisors without any ties to brokerages aren’t eligible. The dates of the transitions refer to the technical changes on FINRA’s BrokerCheck or the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website, or the best available information from company announcements and news reports.
Moves or deals that had yet to be announced as of Dec. 10, 2025, didn’t make the list. That means pending moves and transactions must wait until next year, and those that didn’t get announced until 2025 while occurring in 2024 are ineligible as well.
