Every month, we track three things: completed advisor moves, breakaways to independent firms, and M&A activity among RIAs and broker-dealers, all over the trailing 30 days. Firms are ranked by net change, not raw volume, and anything that looks like a relabeling or a filing catching up to old news gets flagged rather than counted as a fresh event. The goal is a read on where the industry is actually moving, not just a list of who made headlines.
Charles Schwab & Co. lost 44 advisors this month. Its own advisory arm gained 22 of them. Across town, a 16-person team managing $4 billion walked out of UBS for an independent RIA, one of at least 27 teams UBS has lost this year. Same industry, same 30 days, and the story keeps landing in the same place: advisors aren’t just switching firms anymore; they’re switching models, sometimes without even switching companies. Click any bar to visit the firm’s site and explore where advisors moved recently.
The Schwab split is the number worth sitting with. A parent company’s brokerage arm losing 44 advisors while its own advisory arm gains 22 isn’t decline, it’s a shift in which building the advisor works out of. LPL’s +35 keeps it on top for a second straight month. Three of the other four gainers, Schwab Wealth Advisory, TIAA-CREF, and PNC Wealth Management, didn’t appear on last month’s chart at all, only Raymond James repeats. NYLIFE Securities rounds out the loss side at −24, a quieter number next to Schwab and Merrill but still a full-firm-size drop in a single month.
Where the breakaways are coming from
A breakaway is a specific kind of move: an advisor leaving a wirehouse or traditional broker-dealer to join or launch an independent RIA. That’s narrower than the “Biggest Advisor Gains & Losses” chart above, which nets every move in the dataset regardless of where an advisor lands, wirehouse to wirehouse, broker-dealer to broker-dealer, all of it. A firm can look stable on that broader leaderboard while still losing its highest-value teams to this one specific exit. That’s exactly what happened this month.
21 advisors broke away to independent firms this window. We count a firm’s breakaway total by tallying every advisor in the data whose previous firm matches it, source firm, not destination. The chart below shows where those 21 actually came from. It highlights 12 advisors left UBS specifically for an independent RIA, regardless of which RIA they landed at. A 16-person team managing $4 billion left UBS for Cresset Asset Management’s new Boca Raton office in early September and accounts for most of that 12. Our breakaway data captures 10 of them individually, likely because a few team members hold support roles rather than separately registered advisor status.
This isn’t an isolated incident. UBS has lost at least 27 teams managing $28 billion in the first six months of this year alone, according to AdvisorHub’s own tally. One team leaving is a story. Twenty-seven in six months, with UBS still leading the field by a wide margin this month, is a pattern the firm can’t attribute to any single cause.
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Where Breakaways Came From
August 16 – September 15, 2026.
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UBS Financial Services (−12)
Morgan Stanley (−4)
3 Other Firms Combined (−5)
Total breakaways to independent RIAs this window: 21, across 5 source firms.
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Who's buying
14 deals closed this window, and unlike last month’s mix of quiet successions and relabeled filings, most of September’s activity reads as straightforward expansion: firms buying their way into new states and cities rather than absorbing a retiring owner’s book.
Click any bar to visit the acquirer’s site and explore which firms were actively making deals recently.
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Highest AUM Absorbed in Last 30 Days
August 16 – September 15, 2026.
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Mercer Global Advisors
$1,570M
Coastal Bridge Advisors
$1,095M
Modern Wealth Management
$1,091M
Focus Partners Wealth
$963M
Wealth Enhancement
$550M
MAI Capital Management
$492M
F.L. Putnam
$467M
Allworth Financial
$445M
Parallel Advisors
$382M
Level Four Advisory Services
$381M
Other Deals (4 transactions)
$583M
Total AUM absorbed across all 14 deals this window: $8.02B
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Mercer’s $1.57 billion acquisition of Charter Oak Capital Management leads the list and extends its New England footprint. Coastal Bridge Advisors’ three-way combination with Waddell & Associates and One Charles Private Wealth and Modern Wealth Management’s addition of a former LPL group in Florida land almost identically, both just over $1 billion. Focus Partners Wealth’s acquisition of Evernest Financial Advisors rounds out the top four at $963 million.
The rest of the list runs smaller but tells a consistent story: firms buying their way into new markets rather than folding in a retiring owner’s book. Wealth Enhancement, MAI Capital Management, and Allworth Financial each closed a deal in the $400-550 million range, and Parallel Advisors and Level Four Advisory Services closed out the list within a few million dollars of each other. One deal is worth flagging separately: Mercer also announced the acquisition of NorthAvenue Financial Advocates in Ohio this window. It hasn’t shown up in regulatory filing data yet, only in the announcement itself, a reminder that the deals getting talked about and the deals showing up in the paperwork aren’t always the same list on any given day.
What this means going into October
A Dynasty Financial Partners executive argued in July 2026 that the next wave of advisor exits won’t come from wirehouses at all, it’ll come from RIA consolidators themselves, as the advisors who joined during the roll-up boom start wanting the independence a platform can’t fully offer. That’s worth sitting with next to this month’s UBS story. Cresset built its Boca Raton office by recruiting a wirehouse team. If the Dynasty argument holds, some of Cresset’s own advisors become the source of the next breakaway story a few years out.
The Schwab split points to something else worth watching: firms increasingly aren’t losing advisors to a competitor down the street, they’re moving advisors between arms of the same company, brokerage to advisory, commission to fee. That’s not attrition in the way “advisors leaving” usually gets discussed. It’s the same firm’s own book being rebuilt on a different model, and PNC and TIAA-CREF’s gains this month suggest more of the industry’s client-facing infrastructure is quietly following that same shift.
