Adhesion Wealth adds Fidelity research to custom RIA models, waiving platform and tax fees

Adhesion Wealth will let advisory firms commission custom model portfolios around their own investment preferences while waiving both its platform fee and its Tax Management Services fee, pairing Fidelity Investments' manager research with the AssetMark-owned platform's trading, rebalancing and tax machinery.

The Charlotte-based unified managed account provider said the offering puts Fidelity's portfolio construction and manager research behind models an RIA designs itself — its preferred managers, vehicles, asset allocation and rebalancing approach — while Adhesion runs the implementation across multi-sleeve portfolios, ongoing trades, daily tax optimization and tax-aware transitions. The models are open architecture, capable of holding strategies from managers other than Fidelity across mutual funds, ETFs and separately managed accounts, and each one goes to clients under a firm-specific product name with marketing materials written for the firm's own book.

That last detail is more than packaging. A model carrying your name in the client's hands turns portfolio construction into something the firm can sell, which is a different job from the one a third-party strategist performs. The RIA keeps the investment identity while Adhesion keeps the sleeves, the trades and the tax transitions.

Advisors can use the custom offering without paying Adhesion's platform fee or the fee for Tax Management Services, the tax-management service it launched in July. The same announcement added 14 ready-made models to Adhesion Essentials, a lineup that also carries no platform fee, and put a Manager Research Center and expanded direct indexing on the calendar for later this year, with more asset managers to be added to the custom slate.

UMAs hold several types of investment strategy — mutual funds, ETFs and separately managed accounts — in separate sleeves inside a single client account, and running several sleeves across many accounts is operationally heavy; that weight is why TAMP providers built these offerings in the first place.

That weight is also the fork every independent firm with a view on markets eventually reaches: an off-the-shelf third-party model that does not quite match how the firm invests, or a proprietary portfolio that needs staff and infrastructure many RIAs do not have. "RIAs consistently tell us they want to deliver investment experiences that reflect their own preferences without having to build and maintain all the infrastructure and staffing required to manage customized portfolios at scale," said Phill Rogerson, senior vice president and head of RIA at Adhesion Wealth. The offering, he said, gives advisors "a way to deliver tailored portfolios to more clients while addressing greater portfolio sophistication."

Giving away both the platform fee and the tax fee on a new product is a customer-acquisition decision, and the announcement does not say what the economics look like once the waivers come off. The giveaway says Adhesion does not expect the fee to be what wins the mandate; the contest is over who gets the model built and implemented, not who charges least for the shelf it sits on. The same argument took shape in September, when Orion added BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard models to its tax engine; the tax layer is becoming the product, and the platforms that own the trading and tax plumbing can afford to give away the shelf above it.

The structure puts that emphasis plainly: Fidelity supplies research and construction, the RIA supplies the investment view, and Adhesion supplies the machinery it is now willing to hand over at no charge while it competes for the mandate. The new Essentials models carry no platform fee, and the custom offering carries none either, so a platform that has taken the platform fee off both shelves is getting paid somewhere else; where is not part of the release. That is the item for an RIA to nail down in diligence, because a waived fee and a fee that does not exist look identical on the invoice.

Adhesion's parent has the balance sheet to run that play; AssetMark acquired Adhesion from Vestmark in 2022, and per PWD's records, AssetMark reported $91.8 billion in regulatory assets across 456,453 accounts as of Sept. 26, a book that works out to roughly $201,000 an account and sits behind 859 employees.

The announcement describes Fidelity's contribution as portfolio construction and manager research, but it does not say where assets in the custom models would custody or whether a firm running its accounts somewhere else can use the offering the same way. For most prospects that second question is the one that decides the evaluation: an RIA wants to know it can implement the thing in the accounts it already has before it asks who holds the securities. Adhesion's described role — implementation, trading, rebalancing, tax — suggests the model travels with the firm, but the announcement does not say so.

The labor the offering leaves in place is portfolio design: a firm that wants its name on a model has to decide what goes in it, and Fidelity's research is an input to that decision rather than a replacement for it. The announcement frames the arrangement as a partnership between the firm and Fidelity, which is a fair description of the work involved. For a firm that already runs a portfolio committee with a settled view and a bottleneck in operations, that trade is straightforward; for a firm still deciding what it believes about markets, a custom model tier will not decide it.

InvestmentNews frames the launch as part of a string of 2026 releases that treat tailored models as the next contest for RIA assets, and Adhesion has named its next checkpoints: the Manager Research Center, expanded direct indexing and additional manager relationships, all due later this year. The announcement gives no end date for the fee waivers.