Independents are now raiding each other

Six wealth management teams left Commonwealth Financial Network on Aug. 31 to form a new RIA, and four more followed Steven Roth out the same day to Cetera Financial Group. The independent channel is now raiding itself.

Both defections were dated Aug. 31 and originated from the same platform, where a startup with no legacy brand pulled six teams into a new RIA that is still unnamed in the record. Cetera added Steven Roth and four advisors in a direct raid on a rival independent broker-dealer, not a rescue of wirehouse refugees. Advisors are no longer seeking freedom from a wirehouse; they are trading one independent platform for another.

Around the same stretch Tastytrade added a four-advisor team, Parallel Advisors added a six-advisor team, and Merit Financial Advisors kept adding, including Leo Wai. Raymond James landed David Lazorik from Wells Fargo with $160 million in AUM on Aug. 30, and UBS advisors moved to Frost Investment Services in multiple moves. Those moves cut across RIA custodians, broker-dealers, and bank wealth platforms; recruiting competition is no longer segmented by channel. Raymond James's Wells Fargo catch shows the wirehouse-to-independent flow still exists, but it no longer defines recruiting; the independent-on-independent churn does.

When a team leaves an independent platform, forgone revenue and recurring fees walk with it, along with evidence that the platform's offering wasn't sticky enough. Commonwealth still has scale, but two exits in one day reset the recruiting pitch for every independent broker-dealer watching. The new RIA's founders now hold the strongest recruiting asset in this market: a live case study of a book leaving an established platform for a name that did not exist yesterday. That pitch used to belong to breakaway consultants selling the wirehouse exit; now it belongs to the next independent up the road.

Commonwealth could absorb the losses and keep its recruiting economics intact, or the exits could become a template: independent platforms offering transition money to teams that already left the wirehouse once, with no need to sell them on independence. The second path is cheaper because the team has already made the philosophical move; the only question is whose platform gets the economics. The next recruiting deck will cite the Commonwealth exits as evidence that independent platforms are just another farm system.