DeVoe: RIA deal volume down 17% as broker-dealers enter M&A

Independent broker-dealers are buying advisory practices and building employee-advisor RIAs, putting them in direct competition with national consolidators for the same sellers, according to DeVoe & Company's Q3 2026 RIA Deal Book.

DeVoe & Company counted RIA deal volume down 17% in the third quarter.

Broker-dealers are not yet as significant a force as the industry's top acquirers, but they now compete with RIAs and consolidators for the same businesses, DeVoe says.

Consolidators announced 53% of all deals in the quarter, according to this publication's earlier reporting on the same count. Piper Sandler counted 89 third-quarter deals and said activity had not slowed.

LPL Financial has acquired more than 75 practices since launching its Liquidity & Succession program in 2021, per DeVoe, and has opened the program to outside advisors. One analyst has estimated the San Diego-based firm could spend up to $800 million a year buying advisors' businesses. In July, LPL bought Florida-based Good Life Advisors, which FINTRX ranked as the third quarter's fifth-largest RIA deal by assets.

Cetera Financial Group formed Cetera Planning Partners in April, an employee-advisor RIA with roughly $19 billion in assets under advisement that it plans to expand through acquisitions.

Osaic, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, grew its W-2 channel through its 2025 purchase of $13.5 billion CW Advisors and has since moved more affiliated practices into it.

Raymond James, which recently reorganized its succession and capital solutions unit, takes a lender-and-investor approach through practice-acquisition financing, minority equity and full-equity deals.

The push tracks an aging advisor base. Citing LPL's first-quarter 2025 earnings call, DeVoe notes that roughly a third of advisors are expected to retire or leave the industry within a decade, representing $14 trillion, and that broker-dealers are adapting to keep those assets in-house rather than watch them sell to outside firms.

"The [brokerage] model is just not as profitable. It's not as valuable, in terms of multiples," said RIA M&A consultant Corey Kupfer, who said enterprise value opportunities in the RIA model run significantly beyond what brokerage models offer.

Mercer Advisors refinanced $1.9 billion through a Goldman Sachs-led loan this month, cutting the rate by 1.75 points and saying the savings will fund acquisitions, as this publication reported. The broker-dealer programs DeVoe describes run through the firms themselves — LPL's own liquidity program and Raymond James acting as lender and investor.

Sellers with more than $5 billion in AUM announced 41 transactions through September, already surpassing every prior full-year total, according to DeVoe.

Jessica Polito, founder of wealth management M&A firm Turkey Hill Management, said founders nearing retirement drive sales at firms of that size, and that the larger deals have not displaced smaller ones: "We are still seeing an incredibly robust market for small and mid-sized independent RIAs."