Who Made the RIA Top 50 List?

For the first time, Financial Planning magazine has published a list of the largest registered investment advisory firms in the United States, based on discretionary assets under management. The largest firm on the list had assets of $16.9 billion, the smallest firm, $1.7 billion.

What can we learn from this ranking of the big guns in the RIA biz?

Nearly 40% of the firms (19 out of 50) were headquartered in either California (10) or New York (9). The next most popular states were Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Texas.  

 
 
 
The average number of accounts for these mega firms varied greatly – from just 170 accounts for Spruce Private Investors (ranked #21) in Stamford, Conn. to more than 14,000 client accounts for Ronald Blue & Co. (ranked #6) in Roswell, Ga. – which translates into an average account size of $16 million for Spruce, and just over $400,000 per account for Ronald Blue.

Many of the top firms are growing through acquisition strategies, as FP reports:

The top firm on FP‘s list is GenSpring Family Offices in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., which grew to nearly $17 billion in assets under management today from just $500 million in 2001. About half of that explosive growth came through acquisitions of smaller firms like Cymric Family Office Services in Costa Mesa, Calif., which managed $645 million when it was taken over in 2008.

Sixty-four percent of the Top 50 firms had fewer than 50 employees, and the vast majority featured more than 11 financial advisors on their teams.

Financial Planning reports that one of the top challenges for the largest RIA firms is finding, training and retaining talented staffers, along with continuing to provide the higher level of service and customized investment advice clients expect outside the brokerage environment.

1. The Who’s Who List of Independent Broker-Dealers for 2011 Source: Financial Planning   Here’s a handy, alphabetical listing of all the independent broker-dealers who participated in Financial Planning’s 2011 survey along with their corporate contact information, top executives and sales rank for the year. Did your company make the cut? You can also take a more detailed look at the 50 largest independent...