Schwab's fourth Ameriprise raid reprices the breakaway math

Schwab has now pulled four Ameriprise teams of $1 billion or more out of the Minneapolis broker-dealer in 2026, and the fourth is the one the recruiting market is talking about: Rise Private Wealth Management, a Bedford, N.H. firm with more than 100 employees and between $4 billion and $8 billion in client assets. RIABiz reports sources close to the matter place that range near the top.

Neither Schwab nor Dynasty Financial, its recruiting partner on the move, announced anything; the breakaway surfaced when Rise filed its SEC ADV and AdvisorHub broke the story, and Ameriprise has since confirmed the loss. Rise carries 102 employees, and that headcount separates a breakaway from a broker changing logos: a liftout at that scale implies payroll, compliance and technology moving together, which is where a platform partner earns its keep.

RIABiz sizes the two sides of this fight at $6 trillion in custody against $1.7 trillion in brokerage and advice, and reports that Schwab has apparently won $10 billion or more in Ameriprise advisor assets across multiple teams this year, a run the outlet credits in part to a high-multiple market. If the multiple is doing the pulling, Ameriprise is not defending against a bonus war it can settle with a bigger budget line.

RIABiz's account of how a famously insular company became the hunting ground starts with Ameriprise spending decades below the radar, a cohesive Midwestern culture likened to Edward Jones and content to serve sub-high-net-worth clients. The clients then got rich, the advisors' books grew with them, and planners trained well enough to run a planning-forward practice looked across at the RIA sphere and saw the same clients, the same work and a different ownership structure. Nothing broke at Ameriprise; the books grew until keeping them stopped being the best deal available to the people who built them.

A recruiter who spoke to RIABiz on condition of anonymity described two teams gone in thirty days and called the pattern not a hemorrhage but a slow bleed—the industry's preferred way of saying a firm's best producers are leaving slowly enough to explain.

On Ameriprise's July 23 call with Wall Street analysts, Jim Cracchiolo gave the company's answer in cash terms: "Right now, people are taking some checks," the CEO said, adding that "there's a lot of short-termism today." RIABiz notes he may not have been describing Schwab's recruiting at all, since RIA custodians typically do not bid for advisors with bonus money, and that distinction carries more weight than the quote does. A captive employer can match a check but not an ownership stake, and it is the market's willingness to pay a premium for that stake that turns a strong planning team into a recruiter's easiest call.

For advisors weighing the same trade, the composition of the offer is where the money actually sits: the breakaway package now carries an equity kicker, and an advisor who takes the whole thing in cash is selling the second liquidity event for pennies on the dollar. Co-founders Brent Kiley and Robert Bonfiglio appear to have taken the version where the second event is theirs, which at a firm administering something near $8 billion is not a rounding error.

The custodian choice is the next line to underwrite, and it is not neutral because no custodian's is. Schwab has been building its own branch advice business, with 30 Schwab Wealth Advisory offices planned by 2027, which puts the firm holding a new RIA's client assets in competition with that RIA at the retail level. The connector is the asset, and a practice that treats it as infrastructure will eventually find its stack chosen for it.

That choice is no longer a two-horse question, either: custody has stopped being neutral across the industry, from Vanguard's deal for Altruist to Goldman's product-funnel custody and Aquiline's move on Flourish, and a breakaway team comparing platforms is really comparing who else wants the same client. Schwab's edge in this specific fight is repetition: four Ameriprise conversions this year, a track record a rival custodian has to answer with terms rather than a pitch.

Three figures decide whether a recruiting offer is good, and only one of them is printed on the term sheet: the forgivable note is the visible one, the equity—whether carried interest in the new RIA or a stake in the platform—is the second, and the third is what the custodian and the platform take off the practice every year thereafter. After Vanguard's Altruist deal, that line is now the practice's ceiling.

The note deserves its own reading, because forgiveness runs on a vesting calendar: in August, a $5.6 million clawback verdict against a wirehouse broker who left after two years and lost his arbitration fight over a recruiting loan made clear that the calendar, not the headline, is what an advisor is actually signing.

RIABiz's $10 billion-or-more figure covers only the teams Schwab has already taken this year, and four of them have now filed, which is why the next one matters more than this one did.

Watch the ADV feed rather than the announcements. Those filings surface on the team's schedule, four have landed so far in 2026, and a fifth of this size would make the aggregate, not any single departure, the number Ameriprise has to answer.