Four of the industry’s most prominent leaders gathered at the Goldman Sachs RIA Professional Investor Forum Tuesday to make a case that may surprise even the most optimistic observers: the wave of RIA growth reshaping independent advisory is still just beginning.

Key Takeaways:

• Clients independently leaving banks for independent advisors account for far more RIA growth than breakaway advisor moves.
• A projected 100,000-advisor shortage, plus a 50% drop in CPA exam participants, favors scaled RIA platforms.
• As AI standardizes portfolio management, emotional intelligence is becoming the advisor’s most valuable service.

The session, a media lunch moderated by Padi Raphael, global co-head of third-party wealth at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, surfaced a shared view that the forces most often credited for the industry’s expansion tell only part of the story. The quieter drivers, the panel argued, may prove far more consequential for advisors trying to understand where the business is headed next.

See more: Scaling RIA Growth: The Goldman Sachs AI Playbook

The panelists were Shirl Penney, founder and chief executive officer of Dynasty Financial Partners; Robert Sechan, managing partner and co-founder of NewEdge Wealth; Larry Restieri, chief executive officer of Hightower Advisors; and Susie Cranston, chief executive officer of Cresset Capital.

The Migration Movements

Restieri framed the broader shift plainly. “There’s been a lot of people who left wirehouses to go to RIAs, but no one’s ever gone from an RIA back to a wirehouse,” he said.

“It’s a one-way street,” Penney added.

That migration is not only about advisors making the leap. According to Penney, the more underappreciated trend is what he called the “breakaway client” movement — clients leaving banks and brokerages on their own terms to find fiduciary-based advisors. He said the movement is four times larger than breakaway advisor activity.

Of roughly $400 billion that migrated from banks and brokerages to the independent channel last year, only about $100 billion moved alongside breakaway advisor teams. The rest came from organic growth, according to Penney, driven by clients independently seeking out advisors who sit on the same side of the table.

“Fundamentally, what that is, is the consumer choosing with their feet,” Penney said at the session.

Talent Shortage Threatens RIA Growth Pipeline

The panel’s most pointed warning had nothing to do with markets or competition. Cranston raised the alarm on talent, specifically the pipeline drying up at the precise moment demand for wealth management is accelerating.

A McKinsey study that she cited projects a shortage of 100,000 advisors. At the same time, the number of people passing CPA exams has dropped by 50% over the past five to eight years, according to Cranston. And the traditional training grounds where family offices once cultivated sophisticated tax and accounting professionals, primarily large analyst classes at major firms, have largely disappeared as a consequence of artificial intelligence (AI) driven automation.

“I think you’re going to start to see a shortage of qualified, experienced talent,” Cranston said, “and that’s going to give scaled players an advantage, because you’re going to have to really think about how you’re cultivating that group of talent.”

The upshot, the panel suggested, is that scale is becoming less optional and more structural. Restieri described what he calls the “Volkswagen model” — one shared engine of technology and compliance powering a range of distinct client-facing brands. “You can have Porsche, you can have Audi, you can have Lamborghini,” he said, “but you can enjoy the benefits of scale at a corporate level.”

Hightower Advisors launched its own direct-to-consumer brand, Hightower Signature Wealth, last October. Restieri said the brand now holds $30 billion in assets and that he expects it to reach $50 billion by year-end, through a combination of internal and external acquisitions.

Rethinking Allocation: Purpose Over Efficiency

Sechan offered a critique of traditional portfolio construction that he said is endemic to how advisors have been trained to think. The standard framework, in his view, is broken because it treats all of a client’s assets as a single pool optimized for statistical efficiency rather than for what each bucket is actually meant to do.

“Everything you do, whether it be for your liquidity needs, your lifestyle needs, your longevity needs, has a purpose,” he said. “You don’t need to be efficient. You have to be on target.”

The approach involves separating client assets into purpose-defined segments rather than running one blended portfolio toward an abstract efficient frontier, according to Sechan. It also creates room for advisors to steer toward opportunities during market dislocations without disrupting the rest of a client’s plan. NewEdge Wealth reported organic growth of about 11% for its advisors last year, net of market movement and net flows, according to Sechan.

The Advisor as Psychologist

The panel closed with a question about artificial intelligence that produced a consistent answer: AI handles the analytical work, but the advisor’s value increasingly lives somewhere else.

Restieri said the advisor-as-stock-picker model is already fading, as model portfolios and AI push investment decisions toward standardization across the industry. That shift, he argued, puts a premium on something harder to replicate.

“What clients are actually paying for is not so much the investment returns,” Restieri said. “It’s the actual advisor. It’s the EQ of the advisor.”

The best advisors may actually command higher fees in the years ahead, he argued. Not because they generate better returns, but because their capacity to guide clients through fear and uncertainty is scarce and human.

“A lot of the job of an advisor is a psychologist,” Restieri said. Who’s going to get them off the ledge?

Penney offered a concrete preview of what AI-augmented advisory may look like. His firm is about 100 days away from deploying “virtual Shirl,” an AI avatar trained on five years of his emails and hundreds of speeches.

The tool is designed to replicate his voice and communication style for client-facing education and firm outreach. “I think it will be a mass accelerator for people to get educated about Dynasty on the front end,” he said.

Originally Published on Advisor Perspectives

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