Cerulli and Morningstar find DC plans supply 10.2% of the average advisor's wealth clients

Cerulli Associates and Morningstar have measured what many RIA principals already sense: just 10.2% of the wealth clients an advisor serves, on average, arrived through a defined contribution plan relationship. The ambition runs well ahead of that result. In the same survey, 91.2% of advisors called building their wealth practice at least a moderate priority, and about 63% said they wanted to prospect for wealth clients inside the DC plans they already serve.

Cerulli calls the intended sequence the Bridge to Wealth: win a retirement plan client, then systematically find, vet, and convert participants into individual wealth management relationships. Across wirehouses, RIA aggregators, independent practices, and recordkeepers, the research describes that bridge as elusive for nearly everyone who has tried to build it at scale. Chris Bailey, a director at Cerulli, has a plainer reading: organic growth in a wealth practice is difficult work, so advisors may be leaving warmer leads untouched inside plans where a relationship already exists. The findings rest on a survey of hundreds of advisors and dozens of interviews with home-office executives and individual advisors.

Cerulli's cohort detail turns the survey into an operating problem. DC plan specialists, who derived roughly 66% of their revenue from retirement plans, reported serving about half as many wealth clients as their peers, a shortfall the researchers attribute to a lack of technology and manpower. Wealth-retirement hybrids, at an estimated 23% of revenue from plans, sourced 15.5% of their wealth clients from the plan business, while wealth advisors drawing 7% of revenue from plans sourced just 3.5% that way.

The specialists' result is the one to sit with: the deepest plan exposure produces the smallest wealth book, and the constraint those advisors describe is capacity rather than appetite. Read across the three cohorts, the pattern suggests a plan relationship arrives as an administrative contact, not an advisory one, which is why the hybrids actually tending the bridge source only 15.5% of their client base from it.

For the independent practice, the awkward part is that the plan and the wealth business are funded differently: one revenue line pays for the plan, while the wealth practice has to be built and staffed separately if it is to exist at all. The 24.5% of advisors who cite manpower and the 20.9% who cite economics are both pointing at the same problem, and aggregators buying plan-heavy books inherit the same second obligation. The 10.2% average suggests it is rarely funded.

The reasons advisors give for not pushing harder are unglamorous and point at hours rather than conviction: among plan advisors who do not prioritize wealth growth, 37.8% lack the time to prospect inside their plans, 24.5% lack the staff to deliver wealth services to participants, and 20.9% judge the added revenue not worth the effort. Account minimums add their own friction: 52.5% of advisors require new wealth clients to bring at least $250,000 in assets, rising to nearly 60% where the practice is built mainly around DC plans.

Home-office support, as the advisors describe it, reads thin. Among those not prioritizing wealth growth, 53.4% ranked help converting DC-sourced prospects among the top three resources their firm could provide, and 43.7% said the same about help identifying those prospects at all. Those are requests for two separate jobs, a way to see the participant and a way to reach them, and they suggest a function most firms have not staffed.

The 20.9% who judge the added revenue not worth the effort are making a defensible calculation: during the early accumulation years, a participant's balance is small against a $250,000 threshold, and the household may need a decade or more to clear it. A practice that grades itself on assets landed this quarter will not find the bridge worth walking, and home-office encouragement does not change that arithmetic.

This publication has argued that recordkeepers, private-equity owners, and advisor platforms are converting held-away retirement accounts into an advice and distribution channel. The Cerulli and Morningstar baseline measures the opening: if plan relationships supply only about a tenth of the average advisor's wealth book, the plan sponsor's advisor holds a thinner claim on that participant than the plan relationship implies, and a platform already holding the account starts with the advantage. Cerulli's other work this year has tracked the fee-based remaking of advice, including a forecast that retail separately managed accounts will reach $3.6 trillion in 2026. Client acquisition is the harder half of that same shift, and the two research houses have now supplied a baseline for it. The asks their respondents keep repeating are hiring items: someone to find the participants and someone to serve them. Until practices fund both, 10.2% is the number to beat.