The top 20 fastest-growing RIAs — technically speaking

With so many assets under management in motion during the accelerating consolidation of registered investment advisory firms, a snapshot of the fastest growers is bound to deliver surprises.

The below rankings, compiled by data and lead generation firm AdvizorPro, reveal the 20 retail wealth management-focused RIAs where AUM jumped at the highest compound annual growth rate in the past 12 months. But they also reflect the degree to which AUM — one of the most closely watched metrics in the data-obsessed industry of wealth management — depends on M&A deals, internal rollups (within firms like Osaic, Focus Financial Partners and Cetera), the timing of firms’ recruiting transitions and asset values. But AUM also relies, to some degree, on the organic growth of incoming assets from new clients or deeper relationships with existing customers — the most highly valued type of expansion for potential RIA investors.

As such, this top 20 list includes many types of firms, from those that have individual retail wealth management clients to the RIA arms of companies dually registered as brokerages. In addition, it includes some newer firms ramping up quickly through M&A and financial advisor recruiting, such as Modern Wealth Management, Elevation Point, Arax Advisory Partners and Arkadios Capital. The rapid change and enlarging footprint of RIAs emerged as the key themes in this dataset.

“Many RIAs have a tremendous amount of resources to help advisors grow their business. It could be in the form of technology, it could be in the form of a marketing team behind them that’s taking on the responsibility of building the business,” said Jodie Papike, the CEO of recruiting firm Cross-Search. “They take an advisor and their whole goal is to help them scale the business. And they put the resources there so they can do that.”

READ MORE: How consolidation is testing fiduciary duty in RIAs 

Even if several of the firms below landed their spot in the rankings due to a combination of divisions of the same company, each of the below RIAs have boosted their AUM at a compound rate above 100% in the last year. And that’s no small achievement. Yet any such list tracking the fast evolution of RIAs in today’s wealth management industry could look vastly different tomorrow — whether it uses identical criteria to this list or those of other rankings of giant RIAs.

Scroll down for the top 20 registered investment advisory firms that expanded their assets under management at the fastest rate over the past year. Financial Planning’s latest annual RIA Leaders ranking highlights the largest fee-only planning firms in the country, while our analysis of the record-breaking size of RIAs examines the trends behind the industry’s growth.

Note: AdvizorPro created the below rankings based on the compound annual growth rate of a firm’s assets under management over approximately the last year by comparing the latest figures from their Form ADV filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to those of a year ago. The rankings exclude smaller RIAs with less than $500 million and those that do not focus on retail wealth management clients. Since RIAs typically file one Form ADV each March, their current AUM and employee/investment advisory representative headcounts may differ from the figures below.

Asterisks denote companies that operate under a different brand than the name used in their official Form ADV filing. Some of the below RIAs are one of several owned by the same parent firm and therefore may have more “investment advisory representatives” — the closest available regulatory classification that is typically but not always synonymous with the term “financial advisors” — than overall employees. In the same vein, they may have even more AUM across the entire parent firm.