RFG Advisory leads wealth management activity as advisor moves nearly triple deal announcements

Advisor moves ran nearly three times deal announcements across wealth management over the past 30 days, and RFG Advisory led the busiest table with 101 events—one ahead of OpenArc Corporate Advisory and four ahead of UBS. Modern Wealth Management logged 87, NewEdge Wealth 83, Kestra Private Wealth Services 77, and The Wealth Consulting Group 68, leaving UBS the only large wirehouse brand among the leaders.

The busiest category was people changing employers: 2,180 advisor moves industry-wide, against 731 deal announcements and more than the 1,319 that announced and completed transactions produced together. That works out to roughly 73 moves a day against 24 announcements. Executive changes, the next heaviest category, came to 436, and fund launches to 363. Recruiting is the volume business of wealth management, and the firms doing the most of it run independent platforms.

Part of the gap is scale: a deal announcement compresses an entire firm into a single transaction, while a recruiting month spreads hundreds of individual decisions across hundreds of negotiations. Liftouts, 190 of them, are a group moving at once; the 121 new registrations are a practice going into business under its own name; below those sit 35 breakaways and 21 custodian changes, the slowest end of the same market.

A single platform having a busy month could be a fluke, but four of them—RFG, Modern Wealth Management, NewEdge Wealth, and Kestra Private Wealth Services—logged 348 events between them, which reads as a durable pattern. Those platforms are likely bidding for the same teams the banks and wirehouses want, and the counts suggest a meaningful share of the industry's mobility is now settled outside the wirehouse system.

The deal side was still busy: executive changes and fund launches remained heavy, and the industry was still hiring leaders and building products at a pace that would look brisk in most months. Recruiting simply runs at a multiple of it, and for a platform deciding where to spend, the larger number sits on the recruiting side.

The twelve busiest firms logged 952 events in 30 days, an average just under 80 apiece. Beyond the platforms, the list ran to MissionSquare Wealth Management at 85, Frost Investment Services at 68, MissionSquare Retirement at 64, and The Retirement Planning Group and Prime Capital Financial at 62 each—mid-size firms, all of them, each running dozens of discrete events in a single month, a spread that is hard to read as a few teams leaving a few wirehouses.

UBS is the one name whose month cannot be read off the count alone: a firm that size generates events in both directions, and 97 could be arrivals, departures, or a mix of the two. Even without resolving that mix, the month establishes the ratio between the industry's two markets—2,180 advisor moves against 1,319 announced and completed deals, plus 121 new registrations, the smallest unit of the movement and the clearest sign of new firms forming.