LPL and broker-dealer rivals push deeper into RIA M&A as third-quarter volume falls 17%

Independent broker-dealers are pushing deeper into RIA M&A, buying advisory practices and competing with national consolidators for the same sellers, according to DeVoe & Company's Q3 2026 RIA Deal Book. The San Francisco investment bank's report also found that RIA deal volume fell 17% in the third quarter.

LPL Financial has acquired more than 75 practices since launching Liquidity & Succession in 2021 and has opened the program to outside advisors, according to DeVoe. One analyst has estimated that the San Diego-based broker-dealer could spend up to $800 million a year buying advisors' businesses, InvestmentNews reported. Spread across five years, 75-plus purchases works out to roughly 15 a year; an $800 million annual budget against that count implies more than $50 million per practice, which suggests the estimate spans succession lending and other capital rather than outright purchases alone.

The program has already produced a deal large enough to rank. In July, LPL bought Florida-based Good Life Advisors, which FINTRX ranked as the third quarter's fifth-largest RIA deal by assets, according to the report. A broker-dealer taking a top-five slot on an assets ranking is the concrete version of DeVoe's finding that the two buyer groups now want the same businesses.

DeVoe ties the shift to the age of the advisor force. Citing LPL's first-quarter 2025 earnings call, the report notes that roughly a third of advisors are expected to retire or leave the industry within a decade, representing $14 trillion in assets, and that broker-dealers are adapting to keep those assets in-house rather than watch advisors sell to outside firms. For the broker-dealer, the transaction that keeps a retiring founder's book also keeps the client accounts and the payout that runs on them.

Corey Kupfer, an RIA M&A consultant, described the seller's calculation to InvestmentNews: "I think what you're seeing is obviously the robustness of the RIA model and the enterprise value opportunities there are significantly beyond what you're seeing in the brokerage models." The brokerage model, he added, "is just not as profitable. It's not as valuable, in terms of multiples."

That gap is the awkward part of the strategy. If RIA buyers can pay more because their platforms command richer enterprise values, an IBD bidding for the same practice is paying an RIA-model price to hold assets on a brokerage-model balance sheet. The return has to come from retention — the share of the client relationship the firm keeps after the founder leaves — rather than from a re-rating of the acquired book.

Raymond James, which recently reorganized its succession and capital solutions unit, approaches practice M&A as lender and investor at once: practice-acquisition financing, minority equity and full-equity deals, according to the report. The three routes carry different claims. A loan leaves the advisor as owner and the firm as creditor; a minority stake buys a share of the upside without control; a full-equity purchase makes the broker-dealer the owner. The strategic aim — keeping the assets — is the same in all three.

Cetera Financial Group formed Cetera Planning Partners in April, an employee-advisor RIA with roughly $19 billion in assets under advisement that it plans to expand through acquisitions, according to the report. Scottsdale, Arizona-based Osaic built out its W-2 channel through its 2025 purchase of $13.5 billion CW Advisors and has since moved more affiliated practices into it.

At the top of the market the tally runs the other way. Sellers with more than $5 billion in AUM announced 41 transactions through September, already surpassing every prior full-year total, according to DeVoe's report. Jessica Polito, founder of wealth management M&A firm Turkey Hill Management, says founders nearing retirement is a driving factor in sales of RIAs sized around $5 billion. That figure covers only sellers above $5 billion; the 17% decline covers third-quarter RIA deal volume across the market.

DeVoe's conclusion is that independent broker-dealers are not yet as significant a force as the industry's top acquirers, but that they now compete with RIAs and consolidators for the same businesses. If that holds, a practice bought by LPL is a deal a consolidator did not win: the number of transactions need not move for the mix of buyers to. Whether IBDs get from competing to leading is not something the report settles.