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Financial advisors changed firms at a near-decade high pace in 2025, with registered investment advisor and independent broker/dealer channels being the biggest winners, according to an annual report from ISS Market Intelligence released Tuesday.
A total of 39,171 advisors jumped shops last year, a 10.5% rise from 2024 and close to the record 39,889 the New York-based firm tracked in 2022. ISS MI, which is owned by ISS STOXX GmbH, mines regulatory filings to follow the movement of advisors across registered investment advisors, independent broker/dealers, banks and insurance channels, among others.
Most advisors moved within their original channels, according to ISS MI. But the retail RIA channel had the most net gains for the year, with 2,573, followed by the IBD channel with 990. The insurance channel recorded the highest net advisor loss at 1,888, followed by wirehouses at 1,144. That pattern adds to a five-year trend of advisors moving more toward independent channels, according to Alan Hess, vice president at ISS MI and the report’s author.
“What we continue to see across the U.S. wealth landscape is steady migration toward independence, with advisors and reps increasingly moving to a more fragmented RIA market,” Hess wrote.
That movement is partly driven by technological advancements and third-party platform offerings, according to the authors. Those advancements have “allowed more independent reps to replicate more of the capabilities they would have through larger entities,” they wrote.
The results don’t mean that wirehouse and insurance channels won’t still be competitive in the space over the longer-term, just that they won’t be the net gainers, the researchers noted.
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“Rep movement is not unidirectional, as numerous individuals might choose to forego the hassle of operating independently and move to channels with greater internal resources, but the bulk of rep movement continues to point towards greater independence,” they wrote.
The shift to RIA is also creating more complexity in the marketplace for intermediaries, ISS wrote. According to its findings, “nearly 35,000 RIA firms employ five or fewer representatives, pointing to intense fragmentation within the channel.”
While the RIA space may be disparate, several firms in the IBD channel have consistently won the push for advisors.
According to ISS, LPL Financial has recorded the most net gains by far with 7,200 advisors over the past five years. That dwarfs the runner-up, Raymond James, which recorded 1,710 net gains across both Raymond James & Associates and Raymond James Financial Services.
“The firm’s scale reflects a combination of aggressive recruitment strategies, flexible transition support, and continued investment in technology and advisor platform capabilities,” the authors wrote.
Cambridge Investment Research came in third for net advisor gains, followed by Cetera Wealth Services and then Empower Financial Services.
ISS MI’s report uses data from its MarketPro Discovery to track nearly 800,000 licensed financial representatives.