Ameriprise leaks $9.3 billion as custody platforms win

On September 23, the 100-advisor Rise Private Wealth Management team left Ameriprise for Schwab custody with $8 billion in client assets, the largest team movement on record, and within the same five days Fathom Advisors pulled at least $1.3 billion more out of Ameriprise through coordinated breakaways that included a 22-advisor Minneapolis team—$9.3 billion of the firm's client assets set in motion in a single week.

The week mattered because of what moved with those teams: the client record and the cash spread, out of an employee channel and onto an independent custodian, at a scale that redefines what a breakaway can be. The Bedford, New Hampshire team led by Brent Kiley dwarfs the previous high-water mark of $6 billion set by the Taylor team when it left Morgan Stanley for Wells Fargo in August, and at 100 advisors it operates as a branch with a brand.

Fathom Advisors worked the same economics at a smaller denominator, moving $1.3 billion through its platform in pieces: Randy Doroff's 22-advisor Minneapolis team, plus five more groups of eight advisors each led by Nick Adams, Jake Isaacson, Mark Lyon, Todd Doroff, and Trevor Dunn—among them Todd Doroff's, which left Ameriprise. The pattern is a serial liftout: multiple teams leaving the same week and landing on the same independent platform, sharing due diligence and transition costs.

At the other end of the market, the 90-day standings for independent platforms not fighting a legacy parent show the same stickiness: OneDigital added 59 advisors and lost none, Farther added 38 and lost none. Those are dozens of smaller practices aggregated under a platform that holds them, and the same model captures the mega end—Rise's $8 billion—alongside the micro end, where OneDigital and Farther compile books without a single departure back out.