Executives and managers at fast-growing companies are potentially a ripe channel for registered investment advisors to find and cultivate future or immediate wealth clients, even as firms look for new channels for organic growth, according to a panel of CEOs speaking at the 2025 WealthManagement.com Industry Awards Executive Forums in New York City on Thursday.
The RIA space is naturally chasing high-net-worth clients to drive organic growth, but according to the panelists, these kinds of employees within the workplace could be a fruitful frontier for RIAs if they can reach their client fit.
Dave Welling, the CEO of Mercer Advisors, said the mega-RIA is not aiming to serve the broader “retirement” market, which is better suited to mass-scale financial services providers. However, Mercer does see a role in serving mid-level executives or other professionals who are amassing wealth but may not yet have large portfolios of assets.
“In our opinion, nobody is helping the rising executives of fast-growing companies, mid-market companies or the mid-level executives,” Welling said. “They are left wildly untended at periods of time where they’re accumulating a lot of wealth but haven’t banked a lot of investable assets.”
Welling sees opportunities for financial advisors who can find, cultivate and stick with that professional class that may otherwise not be getting attention.
“How do you find them during wealth accumulation years and help them make some really important decisions that will impact them, really, for the rest of their rest of their lives?” he said.
Nate Lenz, CEO and co-founder, Concurrent, said the workplace can also be an important area for RIAs that serve the mass affluent, such as many of those in his firm’s 1099 affiliation model. He said one of Concurrent’s first partnered firms, when it launched in 2016, worked in the 401(k) plan space. Recently, the RIA acquired that firm partly to tap its workplace footprint for new clients.
“We viewed it as a point of strategic importance—one for organic growth,” Lenz said.
However, Lenz said advisors have to be able to provide services to all of an employer’s plan participants to land those clients, which can lead to good wealth clients.
“We needed to find scalable solutions for the rank and file employees, and then to allow us to get the at-bats with some of those mid-level executives,” he said.
Concurrent, which has about 70 network firms, has done that through using third-party service provider TIFIN @ Work for its workplace advice and management tools.
Jim Dickson, partner and CEO of Elevation Point, a relatively new minority investor that stakes firms with assets under management between $500 million and $5 billion, said organic growth is at a premium in dealmaking, and firms that manage to find that in the workplace are at an advantage.
“The interesting thing about this topic to me is that probably the three fastest-growing businesses that we looked at this year—which also happened to go for the highest multiple—were very much focused on organic growth through the workplace marketplace and their household growth,” he said.
Dickson noted that Morgan Stanley, which has a Morgan Stanley at Work division, is an early leader in figuring out the market, but there is room for RIAs to compete.
“I think there’s still a real opportunity for the RIA world,” Dickson said. “Maybe not to play at that scale, but to build a niche-based financial planning process that intersects and provides more intimate planning for those clients.”
The RIA leaders agreed that organic growth is crucial for their acquisition and investment strategies. A firm must have strong organic growth in the double-digit range, or otherwise show the attributes of a firm that can achieve organic growth with the right resources and backing.
“When we look at M&A, we are looking to see if this is growing, or is it something where we can get growth reactivated?” he said. “You see lots of high-quality firms that are doing a great job on job No. 1 [of working with clients], but the growth muscle has atrophied for various reasons.”
According to the panel, another key driver of organic growth is offering adjacent wealth services such as tax and estate planning or even more family-office-style services for the upper-high-net-worth market.
Pathstone, led by CEO Matthew Fleissig, focuses solely on that UNHW space with 750 families with an average of $170 million in assets. His firm’s approach has been a “massive obsession with insourcing,” partly to drive new client growth and touchpoints.
“People are demanding more, and if you don’t have it, they will find it somewhere else,” he said. “Every time you make an introduction, it’s your brand on it anyway. In an unbundled solution [clients] find that they only pay for what they are asking for, and that business model has been an advantage to us for 15 years.”
Today, Fleissig said three of the firm’s most popular services outside investment advice are a personal CFO offering, tax planning and trust work. Those divisions are all growing more than 30%, minus market impact, which creates a wealth opportunity.
“Sixty percent of our new business is starting on the services side, and, as you become the trusted advisor, investments flow after that,” he said.
Mercer’s Welling agreed, hearkening back to the firm’s trust and estate roots when it was founded in 1985. The now $80 billion RIA continues to find clients through those services.
“Out of 35,000 clients, about 60% have gone through an estate planning process with us,” he said. “It’s a lower percentage on the tax side, but 60% to 70% of new clients are signing up for everything.”
#RIA #Leaders #Ways #Drive #Organic #Growth