Banks' upstream push hands RIAs their next breakaway wave

Justin Duke spent 11 years at BNY Wealth watching clients get sorted: fee increases pared the firm's trust and estate services down to high-net-worth relationships, while prospects with smaller balances were routed to centralized offices that, in his telling, operated like call centers. The clients were not changing; the banks were.

Duke, whose 25-year career includes Northern Trust and Regions Bank as well as 11 years at BNY Wealth, is now a managing director and client advisor at Simon Quick Advisors, a Morristown, New Jersey RIA. The firm runs $10 billion in assets under management with 91 employees—including 28 certified financial planners and seven CPAs—and offices in New York, Denver and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The firm, he says, puts far fewer restraints on wealth managers working with mass-affluent clients—an advisor can serve those clients, in his words, "without all of the noise and without all of the headache and the constraints of 'Hey, I've got to leave my old clients behind.'" He told Financial Planning: "There's just a point in time in which the big banks want you to do more, more, more. The banks are changing; the clients aren't."

Will Trout, director of securities and investments at Datos Insights, says Duke's experience has become common enough to form a pattern: fee hikes and rising asset minimums adopted by many banks send a simple message—"Your lower-balance clients aren't valuable anymore." For an advisor who built a book in the mass-affluent space, Trout argues, that message is "an exit signal," and the exit leads to an RIA, where those clients can be served and the advisor can own the relationship.

That shift shows up in the market structure data: Cerulli Associates reported in February that RIAs managed 27% of industry assets in 2024, up from 21% a decade earlier, and ISS Market Intelligence counted 9,525 new FINRA-registered representatives at retail-focused RIAs from 2021 to 2025 against 2,121 lost at banks. The counts are imperfect—a registered representative is not always a client-facing advisor, and some reps sit mostly in back-office roles—but the direction matches the one advisors have been voting with their licenses.

The bank push upstream is a filter, not a corporate strategy: a bank that raises minimums and routes smaller households to centralized service is telling advisors which clients deserve a relationship manager, and telling the advisor who built that book exactly where the exit is. The RIA value proposition—same clients, same service, but ownership of the relationship—makes that exit cleaner.

But the RIA side has minimums of its own in the referral channel: Schwab Advisor Network's $5 million asset floor, as this publication reported in August, forces RIA firms to recruit their own clients, turning an advisor who can carry a book of clients the banks no longer want into the firm's distribution channel.

The bank-to-RIA wave will therefore sort firms by service model: Simon Quick's staffing—28 CFPs and seven CPAs on a payroll of 91—is the kind of infrastructure that lets a smaller account get planning instead of a queue. The firms that can show that bench will get the phone calls, while the rest compete for whatever spills over.

Duke has crossed to a model that can serve clients the banks no longer want, and the Cerulli and ISS data say he has company. The recruiting race ahead will turn on which RIA has built a fee schedule and service model for the clients the banks are sending away.