Mercer Advisors: roughly half of H1 2026 net new assets came from custodian referrals

Mercer Advisors said roughly half of its H1 2026 net new assets came from custodian referrals. S&P says the referral fees paid to custodian partners could limit the firm's margin expansion, according to its credit-rating report.

The two statements describe one arrangement from two angles. A custodian chooses which advisory firms get the introduction, and the fee is what that introduction costs the firm receiving it. S&P does not put a number on the fee here; the point is directional. Money that arrives through a paid channel is worth less per dollar than money that walks in, and the drag grows with the share of growth the channel supplies.

Any RIA that takes introductions from a custodian runs a version of the same trade. The referral fee is an acquisition cost and belongs in the same margin math as a hire or a marketing spend: lifetime value of the household against the cost to obtain it and the cost to serve it. What makes Mercer's disclosure worth reading is the size of the share — roughly half of six months of net new assets is not a rounding item in that calculation.

The custodian side of the ledger is visible in Schwab's third-quarter figures. Schwab Advisor Services net new assets rose 47% in Q3, and Schwab Wealth Advisory net flows grew 55%.

Those are not the same measure — net new assets at the advisor-services unit, net flows at the advice unit — and the material gives no dollar totals for either, so the two percentages should not be read as one comparison. Schwab separately says its advice division holds about 2% of a $37 trillion market. Small share, fast flows, same custodian.

Fidelity's item is a deadline. Fidelity told custody clients with less than $100 million in assets to move by June 2027. The coverage does not say where those firms are expected to go or what a transition would cost them. It says only that the relationship has an end date, which changes the character of platform choice: an assumption becomes a decision with a calendar attached.

Schwab moved a different lever in the same direction, raising the minimum on its tax-aware long-short accounts to $10 million from $1 million, after earlier limiting how much of an RIA's assets could go into them. The accounts accounted for $60.7 billion of Schwab's $187.9 billion in client margin loans at the end of September, according to the coverage.

Put the items side by side and a pattern suggests itself: access to referrals, to custody, and to certain account types is being sorted by size, with fees at one end and thresholds at the other. That is a reading of these disclosures, not a policy any of the firms has stated.

The desk-level response is arithmetic, not alarm. If referrals from a custodian partner supply a meaningful share of a firm's new assets, the fee belongs in the firm's own margin model next to every other acquisition cost, and the model should be stress-tested at a higher referral share. Firms near the $100 million line have a different task: pricing alternatives before the deadline sets their negotiating position for them.

Mercer, meanwhile, is funding growth on more than one front. The firm refinanced $1.9 billion in a Goldman Sachs-led loan, cutting the rate by 1.75 points, and said the savings would fund acquisitions. Referral flow and borrowed money both feed a firm whose stated plan includes more buying; S&P's note is a reminder that the first of those two carries a cost of its own.