Steward Partners CEO Jim Gold looks at the quarterly and annual merger and acquisition totals published by investment banks and industry consultants and thinks the real numbers could be up to 10 times higher.
"It's almost like underground M&A," said Gold, who founded Steward Partners in 2013 with other former Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney employees. "When you think about the companies that put out these reports on 'There were this many deals done in the first quarter,' those are almost exclusively deals done with a banker on them — one of the big banking firms. So nothing we do is in their numbers."
Even so, the five M&A deals the Stamford, Connecticut-based Steward Partners has under its belt so far this year suggest an upward trend in dealmaking. Virtually every firm that tracks mergers and acquisitions among registered investment advisors and other wealth managers expects 2026 to be a banner year.
After reporting in April that the first three months of the year saw a quarterly high of 142 deals, the investment bank Echelon predicted 2026 would end with record-setting 475 transactions. That would surpass the current high of 466 deals logged in 2025.
Gold said that as big as those numbers seem, hundreds of small M&A transactions likely aren't appearing in those annual counts. That's because many smaller deals involve the owner of a solo RIA selling the business to another solo owner.
"And no one talks about that, because there's just two people who merge their practices together," Gold said. "So I think whatever numbers we see on M&A publicly, it's probably 10 times that."
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The high volume of buying and selling means the business opportunities are plentiful for a firm like Steward Partners. When it was started more than a decade ago, Steward Partners was mainly a destination for advisors who, like the Steward founders themselves, wanted to break away from a big Wall Street firm to run their own businesses.
Since then, it has come to derive much of its growth from M&A. Those efforts were given a boost in 2023 when Steward Partners bought the independent firm Freedom Street Partners. As part of that acquisition, Steward brought in former Freedom Street CEO Scott Danner and put him in charge of a new unit dedicated to M&A.
Growth through both recruiting and acquisitions has come quickly. Steward launched with less than $100 million in client assets. It now has $50 billion in assets — $20 billion of that added in just the past two years — and around 300 advisors, all of whom have an ownership stake in the larger firm.
The firm in its early years was an office of supervisory jurisdiction — a large brokerage within a brokerage — of Raymond James. It broke off in 2022 to start its own registered broker-dealer business, although it maintains Raymond James as one of several custodians safeguarding client assets.
Like many acquisitive wealth managers, much of Steward Partners' capital has come from private backers. The firm received its latest infusion in December when it got
Gold recently sat down with Financial Planning to discuss mergers and acquisitions versus recruiting deals, how private equity investors can help firms identify operational weaknesses and how AI could reduce the need for advisors by 25%.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Financial Planning: Would you say more of your growth comes from M&A or recruiting?
Jim Gold: I think the interesting evolution we've seen is that big formally recruiting firms, the bigger and better ones, also now have M&A sourcing and referral opportunities.
So a lot of the folks we ended up acquiring in the last year or so were actually referred to us as, "This is an advisor who's looking to move firms and unhappy where they are." And then what started out as a recruiting conversation turned into, "Hey, now that I understand what you're doing — and you know, I'm 62 and I don't know if I want to work 10 more years — I probably should just do the M&A deal with you guys and maybe wrap it up in five years."
FP: Do you favor M&A over recruiting, or vice versa? Or is it really what the advisors want?
JG: It's an advisor's choice.
We say, "There are two ways you can affiliate with the firm. We hope you join our firm. Whichever door is most appropriate for you, your team and your circumstances is what we want you to choose."
So, right now it's probably running 60% M&A to 40% recruiting.
FP: Is recruiting generally a better business prospect for your firm than M&A?
JG: M&A is a lower payout because we're paying more money for the practice we're acquiring. So there's a longer-term benefit from an EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] perspective.
But the interesting thing with us, I think, is that we're different in M&A. I'm not knocking anyone. But there really aren't many firms that look at the advisor who's selling as a long-term partner of the organization. Most places say, "We're going to acquire you. You're immediately getting rid of your name. How you run money is going away. You're immediately moving to our models over the next 18 months. We're going to pay you a salary, and then you're out the door in two years."
That's fine for the advisor who wants to monetize what they've built. But ultimately, a lot of the M&A we're doing is what we loosely refer to as "sell and stay."
FP: What's the advantage to letting acquired firms maintain their separate identities as part of Steward Partners?
JG: It's not that we don't want to get involved. We have a great platform and technology and offering. But we look at it as, "Here's your menu of options."
We want to say, "Look, how you work with your clients today is obviously working, and it's worked for decades in some cases." So it's much more collaborative.
FP: Are there trade-offs to your approach?
JG: In our model, I think we pay a lot more than some of these firms on an ongoing comp basis, which is important to the people who say, "I have a team behind me that has been with me and helped me build this thing. I want to make sure that they're taken care of."
So I think if you're focused on, "I want to sell to a good company, and I'm happy to exit in two years and have you run the clients the way you want to," there are lots of great choices out there. I think we're a unique choice in saying your team can stay, there's reasonable comp, there's ongoing opportunity, there's ongoing flexibility within the platform and we offer to run the business as you have been.
And what we've heard is the clients are also happier about it. They don't feel like they're forced into a new program that they didn't opt into.
FP: Your colleague Scott Danner likes to say that M&A is saving the industry, particularly by helping retiring advisors sell their firms. Do you agree?
JG: We all know that there's a shortage of next-gen advisors in our industry.
When I look back five years ago when we started talking about getting into doing M&A in a Steward way, it was really driven by the data. At that time, they talked about something like 75% of all assets were in the hands of advisors over 55, and not surprisingly projecting that in 15 years 75% of them are going to be retired.
I looked at it and said, "All of wealth management is going on sale, one advisor, one team, one practice at a time."
I talk to lots of firms, and they say, "I have lots of choices."
And I have to say, "Just realize your clients have trusted you to make hundreds of decisions on their behalf. This is the single most important decision you'll ever make for them. Where does your practice wind up? The money is going to be great no matter who you go to. Make sure everything else is as great as the money."
FP: What does private equity bring to all of this?
JG: I think private equity is terrific, and just like everything else, there's a spectrum of quality in how firms are run.
We've done three capital events in seven years. Also, part of what we do is we spend a lot of time chatting with private equity firms and investors regularly, because I don't want to do that in the process and not talk to a bunch of strangers.
I like the idea that we can sit there and say, "If you were investing, what do you care about?" The problem for sellers is you don't think about selling till you're ready to sell.
So let's have a corny metaphor here. Think of this like a house. You can't just throw your house on the market. They're going to go, "Your kitchen's old, and the bathroom, and your back porch is falling off."
I say, "You know what's wrong with your business? Fix it first, and then try to sell." Take your ego to the side and don't be insulted when someone says, "Hey, this part of your business is not great."
FP: What's your prediction for AI's impact on wealth management?
JG: You're going to need to up your game, because AI is going to start eroding the more mainstream investor. The $300,000 client is probably going to become a do-it-yourselfer.
But I also think the pool of full-service clientele is growing exponentially because of the wealth creation in America. I think the bottom end of traditional wealth management is going to disappear in the next decade, and I think it's going to be like everything else we're seeing: The larger teams, the more sophisticated teams and advisors are going to own all of this. And I think you're going to see that 25% of the wealth management advisors today are going to just get out of the business.
