The 89% question hanging over RIA M&A

Fidelity's midyear RIA M&A review, carried by WealthManagement.com, is easy to misread, because its headline pair—120 first-half deals, down 9% from a year earlier, and $342.9 billion in acquired assets, up 88%—reads like the arithmetic of a boom still clearing higher. Read quickly and the message is that consolidation is working. Read carefully and the market has a shape worth understanding before the next pitch deck cites the total haul, one that rests on a dependency most buyers would rather not name.

Take the arithmetic, because it tells the story better than the totals: $342.9 billion across 120 deals works out to an average of roughly $2.86 billion per transaction, while the median deal, by Fidelity's count, was $630 million, up from $517 million a year earlier. The gap between those two numbers is the finding, and it means a few enormous transactions pull the average upward while the typical deal creeps forward at a pace that looks almost boring—boring, in this market, is the whole point.

Fidelity's William Bruckner noted, with less fanfare, that the consistency at the median transaction size is “even more interesting” than the rising number of $1 billion-plus deals, and he is right: the median describes the market that typical RIA sellers and buyers actually inhabit, and it is climbing steadily, not stuttering. The explanation Fidelity gives is the deliberate one—deals in this range are being structured around succession, platform requirements, and the ability to offer clients more.

That kind of deliberate deal-making changes what an acquisition is for. A seller in the median transaction is choosing a partner with a platform, a succession plan, and services a standalone practice cannot support; the buyer, for its part, is buying infrastructure as much as a book of clients. The result is a market where the asset haul matters less than what the buyer does with the assets, and that is where Fidelity's data gets interesting.

Look at the adjacent-business line: Fidelity counted 12 first-half deals bringing adjacent businesses into RIA ownership, with Cerity Partners and Waverly Advisors the most active, each completing two acquisitions of tax and accounting firms. Cerity Partners, which this publication has tracked since a breakaway advisor merged with the firm three years after launch, now belongs to a cohort that treats a CPA firm as an add-on acquisition.

Fidelity calls this the “Chapter 2 movement” from traditional advisory practice to a more complex financial services enterprise, and the phrase applies beyond tax and accounting: an RIA that owns a tax firm owns more of the client's financial life, a logic that extends to estate planning, lending, and the private-markets strategies this publication has watched mid-sized RIAs adopt. Twelve adjacent deals may be a small number, but they are early proof of where buyers intend to compete.

On the financing side, the concentration sharpens: private-equity-backed or -owned buyers did 107 of 120 first-half transactions, 89% of the total, a share that has now held around that level for two years. Fidelity's analysts ask how long it can continue, and the market should share the anxiety; PE capital has made the liquid, funded, consolidated RIA market possible, but it is not a neutral fuel.

Beacon Pointe Advisors led the twelve-month acquirer ranking through June 30 with 20 deals and $12.4 billion in combined assets, roughly $620 million a deal, essentially the median. The most active buyer in the market runs a disciplined middle-market consolidation playbook, and the fact that its average deal lands essentially at the median says more about where the real competition is than any headline megadeal.

Fidelity has a direct stake in this consolidation beyond polling the deal flow: it holds the assets as the RIAs it serves grow larger, and this publication has argued before that Fidelity's rate moves turned custody into a financing war. A market consolidating into larger, PE-backed firms is a market where custody volume flows toward the few platforms that can handle scale, which makes the data release a map of where that volume is heading.

The demographic pressure underneath the deal flow has not changed: an aging advisor population keeps feeding the pipeline with succession-driven sellers, and the first-half data shows how those sellers are being absorbed—into fewer, larger platforms with a heavy assist from private capital. That structure carries a risk the industry knows but prefers not to name, which is what happens when private capital starts looking for exits.

Fidelity has already asked the question the industry should be nervous to answer—how long can private equity remain the buyer of record—because when the 89% share starts to move, the median will move with it, and that is the number to watch through the rest of 2026.