Cerulli: fee-only RIAs lose asset share despite client loyalty

True fee-only RIAs—those with no affiliated broker-dealer or insurance licenses—held 34% of assets among $5 billion-plus RIAs at the end of 2025, down from 42% in 2020, per Cerulli research commissioned by Credent. Hybrid RIAs with brokerage businesses held 51%, flat over the five years, while independent RIAs with insurance licenses doubled their share to 14%.

The report says true fee-only fiduciary RIAs keep clients more loyal than any other advice model, but the fee-only cohort is being outpaced on growth. The number of $5 billion-plus true fee-only firms rose from 83 to 121 between 2020 and 2025, a 7.8% compound annual growth rate. Hybrid RIAs grew 12.4% a year, from 104 to 186 firms; insurance-licensed RIAs grew 37.3% a year, from seven to 36.

Brendan Powers, a Cerulli senior director who managed the project, does not attribute the lag to weaker service. He said the trend doesn't reflect any weakness in the firms or their models; he cited firms being acquired or acquiring an affiliated broker-dealer. He also said the market now has three RIA subsegments—true fee-only, hybrid with brokerage, and insurance-licensed—where people once treated "fiduciary" and "RIA" as interchangeable.

David Hefty, Credent's co-founder and CEO, said some buyers factor in moving acquired clients' assets from 75-basis-point recurring revenue into a 5% to 7% equity index commission up front. He also cited a life insurance commission equal to 50% to 100% of first-year premium. Hefty was describing what he has seen as a bidder on succession deals, and he said advisors on the selling end sometimes do not understand that assumption. If a bidder can pay for commission conversion, it can outbid a buyer that intends to keep the fee-only model intact, so the market-share shift may be about deal economics more than service quality.

Credent commissioned the research and is itself a fee-only RIA with $5 billion in assets. The data show its model is not losing clients; it is losing asset share as firms are acquired or acquire an affiliated broker-dealer. The succession gap is a supply forecast, as this publication argued in September, and the fee-only model's problem is that it is not the only bidder for that supply.