Fidelity raises RIA custody minimum to $100 million, setting a mid-2027 deadline

Fidelity Investments has extended its $100 million client-asset minimum to every RIA custodying on the platform, not just new arrivals, and firms that fall short now have until June 30, 2027 to meet the bar or begin moving off, according to a letter the firm sent to some advisors and first reported by WealthManagement.com.

The letter, confirmed by Fidelity, is short on ceremony and long on consequence: the firm had already set $100 million as the entry threshold for new advisors, up from a $15 million bar industry watchers trace to 2008, but what changes now is the existing book. Firms that joined the platform when the floor was a fraction of today's sit on a clock, and a clock is what reaches a principal who has not thought hard about their custodian in years.

Fidelity's own language stays mild. “At Fidelity, we regularly evaluate our business model, brokerage platform and client relationships to ensure they align with our long-term strategy,” the letter reads, and a spokesperson added that the firm recognizes change “requires thoughtful planning” and has committed to giving firms time to evaluate their options. For advisors who need to leave for lack of assets, the letter says Fidelity will remain “committed to servicing your needs during this period of transition.”

Small firms have seen this arithmetic before: in 2013 Fidelity imposed a $2,500 quarterly fee on firms with under $15 million in client assets, a charge built to make the smallest relationships pay for themselves or go, and the new minimum applies the same logic at a far larger scale. Fidelity's clearing and custody business, which includes National Financial Services LLC, ranks second in RIA custody behind Schwab, which has no publicly reported minimums for RIAs—the comparison every affected advisor will reach for.

Altruist's Jason Wenk did not wait, telling a LinkedIn thread on the change that his firm could serve the advisors who need to leave Fidelity and questioning whether the $100 million threshold would hold. Wenk is working through the final steps of selling Altruist to Vanguard, a deal announced earlier this year. Tim Welsh, founder and president of Nexus Strategy, took the longer view in a white paper on the move, raising the prospect that custody minimums keep climbing as part of a series he is writing on the realities of the business.

Welsh has pattern on his side: Schwab has been raising the thresholds for advisors to join its client referral program as it seeks to manage those clients itself, and Fidelity runs a similar program with fewer participants. Custody's direction has been one-way for a while—platforms get more selective, not less.

For a principal, the near question is arithmetic: the runway to June 30, 2027 runs roughly nine months from the change becoming public—long enough to convert a firm that is close, short for one building from far below. The coverage does not say how many firms sit under the line, but the exposed cohort is the one furthest from the platform's economics: younger firms, sub-scale firms, and breakaway teams that landed at a size now below the bar.

That cohort is also the one Altruist was built to hold, making Wenk's LinkedIn interjection a recruiting pitch dressed as a question. The pattern of what custodians sell has been shifting: Altruist owns the client record, Schwab took a seat at the front of Anthropic's RIA queue, and Fidelity's balance sheet still underwrites onboarding software upstarts. Fidelity's minimum says which relationships it values least, and the answer is the small ones.

This desk has long argued that scale is oversold and durability underpriced in the advisor business, but Fidelity's move is a reminder that the claim has a boundary: at the platform layer, scale is priced in public. A custodian needs it to run clearing, custody and compliance at a profit; an advisory firm does not need to be that custodian to be durable. Both facts can be true, and the firms now below the line are absorbing the first one.

There is an M&A read, though the coverage reports none: a sub-$100 million book facing a custody deadline is, on paper, a tuck-in for a larger acquirer, or a client-transfer candidate for a platform that wants the assets without buying the firm. Neither route is free, and once June 2027 arrives neither is the firm's to control.

Watch the number itself. Wenk questioned whether $100 million holds; Welsh is betting it will not. If the floor rises again before 2027, firms that spent this year building toward it will find they bought a runway that ends at the next announcement. Fidelity has given them a date. Whether that date is the last one is what the next 27 months will test.