Aggregation platforms make it easy for clients to compare advisors. You’re now one option among many.
Owning a niche that no aggregation platform can serve keeps an advisor on the list. Three examples are business-owner liquidity events, executive compensation, and wealth passing between generations. Each one depends on knowing the client’s business, family and taxes. Clients can compare fees on a platform. That knowledge doesn’t show up in the comparison.
What’s happening
Platforms like Pontera, Orion, and Addepar give clients a single view across all their financial accounts, regardless of which advisor manages them. When clients can see every fee, every return, and every allocation side by side, the comparison shopping begins. The advisor who can’t articulate their specific value beyond ‘we manage your portfolio’ becomes the one who gets consolidated out.
DeVoe & Company counted a record 322 RIA deals in 2025, up from 272 in 2024. Fidelity tracked 276 completed deals with $796.4 billion in assets and found private equity behind 88% of them. Acquirers are buying for AUM, not advisory relationships. When a larger firm acquires a smaller one, the first thing they evaluate is which client relationships can be served more efficiently, and which advisors are redundant. The industry is consolidating from the top and the bottom simultaneously.
The clients most likely to consolidate are the ones advisory firms value most: high-net-worth individuals with multiple advisors. When a client working with three advisors realizes they can get a unified view and potentially better pricing by consolidating to one, the advisor without a differentiated offering is the first to go.
Why the obvious responses don’t work
“Deepen the relationship”
Relationships are necessary but not sufficient. Every advisor claims a deep relationship. When the client sees identical portfolio management from three advisors at three different price points, the relationship doesn’t justify the premium. The offering does.
“Offer more products”
More products isn’t more value. Adding insurance, lending, and estate referrals makes you a one-stop shop, but it doesn’t make you indispensable. The aggregation platforms are built to compare one-stop shops against each other.
“Match the platform pricing”
You can’t match platform economics with a human-delivered model. Platforms amortize technology costs across millions of accounts. You amortize advisor costs across hundreds. The unit economics will never converge.
What’s working instead
The advisors who survive consolidation own a niche the client can’t get elsewhere. Business owner liquidity events. Executive compensation optimization. Multi-generational wealth transitions. No platform offers these. They require knowing the client, their business, their family, and their tax situation. Specialists don’t get consolidated.
The way out is to stop optimizing the old model and sell new services built on what AI can’t do. We find out what your clients will pay for, then build the AI that delivers it. Start with a pilot: in two weeks, a working first version tried on your own client work, then a decision on production. Or start with a plan for the whole firm.
Other pressures on Financial Advisory Firms
Revenue compression
AUM-based fees are under pressure as robo-advisors and direct indexing platforms deliver portfolio management at a fraction of the cost.
Planning commoditization
Free AI tools now draft the baseline financial plan. Inside a bundled AUM fee, you have no way to show clients what your planning is worth.
The same pressure in other industries
Related reading
McKinsey Put Numbers on Your Repricing
Your clients decided AI should make your work cost less. McKinsey’s QuantumBlack puts 32 pages of evidence behind that, and prescribes a cure you don’t need.
YC Published the Playbook for Replacing Your Firm
Y Combinator is teaching founders to build AI-native firms that sell outcomes. Its four targeting criteria double as a diagnostic for your exposed services.
Start as small as one idea, or as big as the whole firm.
Bring what put AI back on your agenda. In 20 minutes we’ll tell you whether it’s worth acting on, and where to start.
Book 20 minutes