Fidelity tells sub-$100 million RIAs to grow or move by June 2027

Fidelity has told the RIAs holding less than $100 million at the custodian that they have until June 2027 to get above that line or move their assets, and there is no fee that buys a small firm more time. The notices went directly to the affected firms, and Financial Planning reported that the platform's existing $100 million joining minimum now applies to practices already on the platform, not only to new arrivals.

The measurement is what decides who is actually on the list. Fidelity counts assets held at Fidelity, not a firm's total assets under management, so a practice running well north of $100 million in aggregate can sit below the line if a meaningful share of client money is held somewhere else. That screens by the custodian's ledger rather than by the size of the business, and the firm exposed by it is the one that spread its book across platforms over the years.

Which is worth saying plainly, because the line can be misread as a verdict on the practice. A firm under it may be a durable business that chose to spread custody risk rather than a weak one, and the test measures concentration at a vendor. The practices at the top of the platform are untouched by a rule of this kind, which means it lands on the firms with the least capacity to absorb a project.

Michael Kitces called the hard no bizarre, noting that earlier increases in the custodian's minimum let small firms pay a fee and stay put. Remove the fee and the change stops being a pricing decision. A fee is a line item a practice can carry while it works out what it wants to become; the absence of one takes waiting off the list of things it can do. A firm whose book has lived at a single custodian since it was founded is now choosing among options it did not generate, on somebody else's calendar.

June 2027 sounds like distance and is not. Repapering accounts, rebuilding reporting and service routines on an unfamiliar platform, and holding clients steady through a custodian switch run in sequence, and a firm that has never done the exercise will find eight months brisk; the owner has to keep the business running while it happens. The coverage does not say whether a practice that clears the line and later slips back is tested again, or whether a firm on a credible path to the minimum gets flexibility on the date, and both unknowns shape how much of the work is worth starting now.

The same week's coverage carried three transactions that map the shapes available to a practice facing the line. Concurrent acquires Spire, a $5.4 billion RIA with 30 advisor teams, and Spire's advisors keep their own brands and their independent-contractor status; both advisors and employees become eligible for Concurrent equity a year later. The coverage gives no purchase price, so no multiple can be derived from it, and the part worth reading closely is when the consideration arrives. Eligibility that shows up a year out leaves part of what the people inside the firm eventually receive dependent on how the business looks after the integration has had time to bite.

Cullman/Holt Group is the second shape, and the more common one: seven people moving $1.3 billion from UBS to Ascend Advisory Group, a Wells Fargo FiNet affiliate that manages more than $2.5 billion out of Dublin, Ohio. Ownership does not change hands in a move like that. The team keeps its clients and pays for the transition in months of disruption instead of in equity, and a book that size is what an affiliate platform is built to absorb. On the receiving side the appeal is easy to see: assets arrive attached to the advisers who service them, growth a platform does not have to originate.

Lakewood Wealth is the third and the smallest: a $170 million Ann Arbor team moving from Cambridge to LPL, with a three-adviser book spanning advisory, brokerage and retirement plan assets and transition terms the coverage does not disclose. Transactions at that size rarely carry a public number, and they are the ordinary business of the advisory labor market.

Set the three side by side and the range runs from $170 million to $5.4 billion, with only one of them a change of ownership. That spread is the useful part for a firm under the Fidelity line. It can grow through the threshold, which is one of the two routes the letters name and the one the affected practices have by definition not yet taken; it can move the book to another platform, keeping the asset the owner eventually wants to monetize; or it can combine with a larger firm, an ownership decision the letters neither require nor address.

The route a practice takes is mostly a function of what its owner wants in five years, and the date compresses that decision rather than changing it. Growing through the threshold is a sales problem against a fixed clock, and it depends on people outside the firm saying yes; moving is an operational project with a visible end; combining converts the question into a negotiation about price, terms and what the principal does on Monday. The letters name only the first two.

Terms are a function of size as well. Concurrent's structure is legible because a $5.4 billion transaction gets described in public, while the coverage carries no consideration detail for Lakewood. The smaller the deal, the thinner the sample a seller has to benchmark an offer against, which suggests the questions asked in the room matter more than the comparables.