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In Practice December 1, 2025
PE Drives Multiple Advisory M&A Records in 2025
Aging advisory firm owners are relying on mergers and acquisitions to determine the next phase of their practices.
Reported by Edward Rueda
“Robust” is how Peter Campagna, managing partner in the Wise Rhino Group, describes this year’s mergers and acquisitions among registered independent advisory and wealth management shops. The first three quarters of 2025 broke records for RIA and wealth management M&A, according to data from consulting firms Echelon Partners and MarshBerry.
In the third quarter, RIA M&A deal volume reached a record high of approximately $1.2 trillion in assets under management, according to Echelon. By MarshBerry’s count, there were 315 wealth management M&A deals this year through the end of October—a 13% year-over-year increase from the previous record set in 2024.
The high volume of M&A has been mainly driven by private equity. Barnaby Audsley, a senior vice president at Echelon Partners, wrote in an email that his firm anticipates 43 direct PE investments by year-end, which falls short of 2024’s total of 51 investments but is well above 2023’s total of 30.
John Orsini, director of MarshBerry’s wealth advisory division, says pop culture may view PE operatives as corporate raiders, but PE investments act much differently with advisories.
“Private equity is finding best-in-class firms with leadership teams whom they believe in and [who have] a proven track record of growth,” Orsini says. “They’re bringing capital and resources … and then empowering these teams to go out and do M&A.”
The Year’s Big Deals
Creative Planning LLC, an independent wealth management firm with private backers that include TPG Capital and General Atlantic, announced on October 9 its acquisition of SageView Advisory Group, forming a combined total of more than 550 advisers and $640 billion in total client assets. Audsley, Campagna and Orsini agree that it was one of the year’s standout moments in M&A, showing how massive deals can supercharge the convergence of wealth and retirement planning.
“[SageView’s] whole goal was to build out a wealth management arm and take advantage of [its] million participants … but they found it difficult to do that,” Campagna says. “Instead of organically building that wealth division … they decided to team up with a very fleshed-out, sophisticated wealth management firm.”
In contrast, Campagna says NFP Corp.’s September 3 sale of its wealth business to Madison Dearborn showed how M&A can help narrow a company’s focus. NFP returned to insurance and retirement, and the wealth businesses consolidated into one platform, Wealthspire, in November.
Audsley wrote that other major sales of the year included:
- Mariner acquiring Cardinal Investment Advisors in January;
- LPL Financial buying broker/dealer Commonwealth Financial Network for $2.7 billion in March; and
- Bain Capital’s acquisition of a 9.9% ownership stake in Lincoln Financial for $825 million in April.
He also wrote that Dynasty’s minority investment in September in the RIA firm OpenArc, formed by a breakaway team from Merrill Lynch, “could prove to catalyze a trend of larger breakaway transactions, as teams see OpenArc’s success as a sign that a transition to the independent RIA model is feasible and attractive.”
Strategic Buyers and Sellers
Orsini says his word for M&A in 2025 is “inflection”; he sees large, private-equity-backed firms not just seeking out assets or headcount, not just solely focusing on scale and geography, but specifically seeking out youth and talent.
“It becomes increasingly about a talent play,” Orsini says. “They’re looking for the next generation of advisers to continue on.”
Then there are the sellers. Orsini says he takes clients through a “build, partner or buy” analysis to see if they can achieve growth goals on their own or need capital or resources from another firm. In Orsini’s words, firms can partner up to get the “growth, capital, alignment, resources and capabilities to take [them] to the next level.”
As Generation X enters its 60s, the advisory field at large is entering a “retirement boom,” with 37% of advisers expected to retire between 2024 and 2033, according to McKinsey & Co.
Campagna, who runs a boutique firm specializing in firms with less than $3 billion in assets under management, says roughly two-thirds of his M&A clients are advisers nearing retirement who are figuring out the next stage for their firms. He says the other one-third are companies that hit a “complexity wall” and lack resources to scale operations or offer a management buyout.
Whatever the reasons behind a sale or partnership, an M&A deal usually takes at least six months to finalize, and Campagna views himself as a “mountain guide” and sometimes even a “punching bag” for emotionally taxed clients through the lengthy process.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime journey to sell your life’s work,” Campagna says. “Most of my work is emotional handholding, guiding and keeping people on course.”
Outlook for 2026
Audsley, Campagna and Orsini are not expecting advisory M&A to slow down in 2026, even as stock market outlooks are not uniformly rosy. When Wall Street briefly dipped in response to the U.S. announcing global tariffs in April, Orsini says none of the deals he was working on “broke stride.”
“They’re financial planning firms, so their clients are prepared for when something like this is going to happen,” Orsini says. “It’s not mass panic like you would have seen maybe 10 years ago in a market correction.”
Of the more than 15,000 RIAs in the U.S., only a few hundred were involved in M&A deals this year, indicating potential for growth.
Audsley wrote: “As long as there continues to be a large pool of well-financed buyers in the industry and a large number of motivated sellers, M&A activity will continue at its higher rates.”
