By Hesom Parhizkar, Co-Founder of AdvizorPro

In the financial advice ecosystem, one way relationships can be destroyed are when advisors are picked off by other firms, poached away to join another company. While historically there might have been more patterns behind where advisors would go and when in their careers, that’s shifting. 

Recent trends across the US Wealth Advisor Movement Report make it clear that advisor movement remains active across the industry, but the destinations are becoming less predictable.

Advisor Movement Is Becoming Harder to Predict

Take one of the top financial firms in the country, LPL Financial, for instance. Since its acquisition of Commonwealth, it has been steadily losing advisors for months; it has not maintained 90 percent of advisors, although it may have kept that percentage in assets. And while there have been some likely candidates picking up that advisor talent, such as Raymond James which was allegedly also interested in acquiring Commonwealth, there are also advisors selecting their own future destinations that are seemingly less obvious.

One location some advisors have recently departed Commonwealth and gone to is Ameriprise Financial Services. That’s particularly telling because in AdvizorPro analysis at the end of 2025, Ameriprise was the top company who organically acquired LPL’s advisors. 

Two hundred one advisors left LPL to go to Ameriprise in 2025. But MML Investor Services was not far behind, scoring 181 LPL advisors and Lincoln Financial got 174. AdvizorPro’s analysis of the top 10 platforms that received LPL advisors showed there were 10 firms that acquired between 200 and 100 professionals last year. 

Additionally, the top 20 firms achieved nearly 40 percent of the share of advisors switching and all other platforms got the remaining share. That shows that firms don’t have to worry about just one boogeyman stealing their talent; they need to constantly look over their shoulders at practically every firm. Or at least most likely those in the same channel, such as a registered investment advisor (RIA) or wirehouse.

This broader fragmentation also appears in our analysis of 69,000+ Advisors Changed Firms in 2025, where switching activity remained widely distributed rather than concentrated among only a handful of dominant platforms.

What This Means for Recruiters

This kind of environment will cause recruiters to be incredibly strategic. Observing how long an advisor has been at their firm is one criteria for whether they are apt to depart or not. But then it becomes a matter of where that advisor is apt to go; understanding that truly narrows down the pool of advisors interested in a recruiter’s particular firm.

There are also loyalty issues that are showing themselves. For instance, in the latest AdvizorPro evaluation of financial advice channels, wirehouses have the lowest likelihood of advisors remaining in that channel at 23 percent; dually registered firm advisors are about half as likely to stay in their channel as they are to go elsewhere. That represents a stark difference between RIAs with a 97 percent chance of remaining within the same channel and broker dealers at 89 percent. These channel level patterns are explored in more detail in Advisor Channel Migration: Who Stayed and Who Switched.

Inspiring More Loyalty

While it may seem challenging, if not impossible, to evoke loyalty in an industry where mergers and acquisitions are occurring multiple times a day practically every day, firms must evaluate how they retain their top talent. Pay increases certainly can help but oftentimes it comes down to culture; as the saying goes, “people leave people.” Particularly for wealth management channels that are quickly losing their top talent, making manageable changes such as encouraging more work-life balance need to occur immediately.

See Where Advisors Are Actually Moving

The competitive landscape for advisor talent is no longer defined by a few obvious rivals. It is shaped by a much wider ecosystem of firms competing for the same advisors, often across overlapping channels and with increasingly diverse value propositions.

For recruiters and firm leaders, that means talent strategy cannot rely on assumptions. It requires a clearer view of where advisors are moving, which firms are gaining share, and how channel dynamics are shifting over time.

AdvizorPro allows firms to track advisor movement, identify recruiting opportunities, and understand which platforms are gaining or losing talent across the wealth management ecosystem.

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