RIA consolidation is the dominant industry story of the past five years. Roughly 250–350 advisory firm acquisitions get announced each year, with another tier of smaller tuck-ins happening below the press-release threshold. The cumulative effect: the share of total RIA assets controlled by the top 50 platforms has roughly doubled since 2018.
The live tracker is at /insights/mergers, built from Form ADV Item 1.O successor disclosures filed with the SEC. Every entry links to the acquiring firm's profile, and where the acquired firm's CRD has not yet been terminated, to that profile as well. This article explains how to read the tracker and which deal patterns are worth paying attention to.
What Form ADV Item 1.O actually captures
Item 1.O on Form ADV Part 1A asks every SEC-registered RIA two questions each filing cycle:
- Did you acquire the advisory business of another firm in the past year?
- If yes, what was the approximate AUM transferred?
The answer to the second question is what powers most public M&A trackers, including ours. The SEC doesn't ask for the acquired firm's name in the filing itself, but the predecessor firm typically files a Form ADV-W (termination) around the same time, and matching the dates and AUM amounts identifies the counterparty in most cases.
One limitation: Item 1.O captures acquisitions where the acquired firm's entire advisory business transferred. It does not capture asset purchases where one firm bought a book of business from another but the seller remained operating, nor team lift-outs where an advisor and her clients moved firms without an entity-level transaction. Both are common and don't show up in Item 1.O data.
The platform consolidators driving most deals
About 70 percent of disclosed RIA acquisitions in any given year are concentrated among roughly 15 platform consolidators. The pattern is consistent: each platform is backed by a private equity sponsor (or a strategic with PE-like ambitions), holds a substantial cash facility, and pursues a stated acquisition cadence of 6–15 deals per year.
The most active platforms over the past 24 months include:
- Mariner Wealth Advisors — built through aggressive partner-firm acquisitions across the U.S.
- Creative Planning — Peter Mallouk's Kansas-based platform, with deals concentrated in tax-services-adjacent firms.
- Wealth Enhancement Group — TA Associates-backed, aggressive Midwest and Southeast acquirer.
- Mercer Advisors — Genstar and Oak Hill-backed, regularly in the top 5 by deal count.
- Hightower — Thomas H. Lee-backed, focused on $500M–$2B regional firms with founder transitions.
- Focus Financial Partners — went private via Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and Stone Point in 2023; longest-tenured platform in the space.
- Beacon Pointe Advisors — KKR-backed, women-led firm with disciplined acquisition cadence.
- Cerity Partners — Genstar-backed, focused on the upper end of the wealth management market.
Each platform has a profile in the directory with its full filing history and current AUM. The pattern to watch: when a platform crosses an AUM milestone (typically $50B, $100B, $250B), the next funding round and the next wave of acquisitions usually follow within 12–18 months.
Three deal types you'll see on the tracker
Founder transitions. By far the most common pattern. A founding advisor in her early-60s sells her firm to a platform in exchange for upfront cash plus rollover equity, then continues advising clients for a 3-5 year earn-out. The platform gets AUM and a continuing relationship; the founder gets a liquidity event and a glide path to retirement. Typical deal size: $200M–$2B in AUM.
Tuck-ins. A platform acquires a smaller firm in a market where the platform already has presence, primarily for geographic density. Deal sizes typically range from $50M to $300M in AUM. The acquired team often joins an existing platform office.
Platform-to-platform mergers. Less common but more consequential when they happen. Two consolidators combine — sometimes through full stock-for-stock mergers, sometimes through one buying the other. These deals often trigger a wave of advisor departures from the combined entity in the following 12 months.
What to look for when researching an acquisition
If you're a client of an RIA that just got acquired, three things matter:
The earn-out structure. Most deals tie a meaningful portion of the seller's consideration to client retention and AUM growth over 3-5 years. That keeps the legacy advisor team motivated to stay and serve clients. It also means your advisor's economics are tied to keeping you as a client — generally a good alignment for the first few years.
What changes operationally. The custodian may change. The investment models may change. The fee schedule may not change immediately but often migrates over 12-24 months toward the platform's standard. The technology stack almost always changes. Your client-facing advisor usually stays the same in the first year.
The terminal pattern. Three to five years after the deal closes — when the earn-out is fully vested — is when most advisor departures happen. If your advisor leaves in year four or five, they often go to a smaller independent or a different platform, and they may or may not be free to bring you with them depending on non-compete terms.
The opposite signal: organic growers
The flip side of the M&A tracker is the organic growth leaderboard — firms that grew AUM at high rates without filing a successor event. These are firms that chose not to sell (or weren't approached), and grew through net new clients instead.
Both lists are useful, depending on what you're researching. The M&A tracker tells you who's deploying capital and where the industry is consolidating. The organic-growth leaderboard tells you which firms are winning clients on their own.
Browse the live M&A tracker at /insights/mergers, updated each month as new Form ADV filings are published.
Built from SEC Form ADV Item 1.O successor filings. Updated monthly. Every entry links to the acquiring firm's profile and AUM history.