Schwab turns Ameriprise recruiting into a serial launch program

Rise Private Wealth Management let its SEC filing do the announcing that neither Schwab nor its recruiting partner, Dynasty Financial, chose to do. AdvisorHub broke the move, Ameriprise has since confirmed the loss, and sources close to the matter put the 100-plus-employee Bedford, N.H., team led by Brent Kiley and Robert Bonfiglio right near $8 billion, the top of the $4 billion to $8 billion range attached to the new firm.

This is the fourth billion-dollar-plus Ameriprise team Schwab has taken in 2026, with an estimated $10 billion or more in Ameriprise advisor assets now attached across the custodian's multiple teams. The Aug. 19 report tallied roughly $534 million across four competitor hires in a single week, and one custodian has pulled far more than that from a single broker-dealer.

The pace is not confined to Ameriprise: a $1.3 billion breakaway landed at Schwab on Sept. 16 and a $1.0 billion custodian change on Sept. 10, but Ameriprise, the $1.7 trillion Minneapolis brokerage, is simply where the recruiting desk has found the deepest bench.

A recruiter who spoke to RIABiz on condition of anonymity described Schwab and Dynasty as having teamed up to take Ameriprise's largest and most prestigious team, and put the pattern in terms the firm will not enjoy: two such departures in 30 days, he said, was "not a hemorrhage but a slow bleed."

Ameriprise chief executive Jim Cracchiolo addressed the pressure on the July 23 call with analysts, saying the firm is absorbing the effect of bonus money pulling advisors and prospects away in the short term. "Right now, people are taking some checks," he said, adding later, "there is a lot of short-termism today." Whether he was describing custodian recruiting at all is less clear, since RIA custodians typically don't recruit with bonus money — a caveat worth holding onto as the tally grows.

Brooke Southall's note on the story supplies the useful history: Ameriprise was long treated as impregnable, cohesive in the Midwestern manner of an Edward Jones and content to fly beneath the radar, and it was genuinely interested in clients below the high-net-worth line. Then those clients got rich, the brokers' books grew, and advisors trained in financial planning looked at the planning-forward independent channel and saw their own next decade. The training that makes an Ameriprise advisor good is the training that makes him portable.

The fourth team matters more than the first: a single departure is a story a firm absorbs and a client forgets, while four in one year, each a billion dollars or more, is a template with a track record. Every completed launch lowers the perceived career risk of the next one and hands the recruiting desk a reference list of peers who already jumped — a dynamic that compounds faster than any retention package, and does so without a signing check, because custodians generally don't recruit with bonus money.

For RIA principals the read is direct: if a custodian can stand up a 100-person firm in a single filing, the cost of experienced advisors going independent falls and the price of keeping them rises, and that pressure lands hardest on the mid-size independent with neither equity to give nor a custodian's economics to spend.

At this size the vocabulary breaks down: Rise is described as a team, but it is a firm of more than 100 employees — 102 on its books — with registered assets on the new file still reading zero as of Sept. 19. People first, paperwork to follow. The advisor talent war has decoupled from the solo breakaway and moved into block trades and employee-channel book movement, and this deal is the sharpest illustration yet: the breakaway stops being a rounding error when it arrives with an operating staff and $8 billion attached. What remains a rounding error is the small one.

It is also a clean test of the argument made last month, that the custody handoff had become the talent war's new front — that the fight for advisors had moved to the workflow that moves their accounts. The exhibit then was a $1.6 billion liftout at LPL; Rise is roughly five times the size, and pairing a $6 trillion custodian with a recruiting partner on a launch this large suggests the pitch is no longer custody in exchange for assets. At 102 employees, what a team needs on day one is infrastructure, and Schwab brought a partner to supply it.

For RIA acquirers the consequence is direct: a team like Rise has an alternative to being acquired — a launch underwritten by a custodian's economics, with no cash multiple required, exercisable at $8 billion without selling anything. Increasingly, the rival bid for a great Ameriprise team comes from a recruiting desk, and the test of whether that is a pattern or a run of luck is whether a fifth ADV lands before the year ends.