In Los Angeles and across the country, wealth advisers are packing up their millions or billions of client assets and heading for the door.

Adviser movement soared in 2025, a national study from Diamond Consultants shows, with 11,172 professionals changing firms, up 16% from the prior year. 

Several recent blockbuster moves in L.A.’s wealth management scene factor into that jump, and growing consolidation – and discontent – among the city’s money managers could drive the trend further. 

“People don’t move when they’re happy and things are going well,” said financial adviser Bruce Munster of the $3 billion Munster Freeman Group, which joined Wells Fargo Advisors’ Manhattan Beach contingent from UBS last November.

The eight-person group was one of 54 $1 billion-plus U.S.-based teams that transitioned in 2025. More than half of those came from wirehouses like UBS, which saw significant attrition following compensation plan changes and cost-cutting measures. The Swiss firm lost 318 advisers last year and added 75, Diamond reported.

Cost-cutting, low growth appetite drive advisers out

Since rescuing the flailing Credit Suisse in 2023, UBS has cut roughly 15,000 jobs, company filings show. Munster said a “frustrating” hiring freeze stopped his team from bringing on a new employee it wanted. 

“Based on the size of our business, we were owed a person and didn’t get that person,” he said. “That seems to be a common challenge.”

A sticking point that pushed David Tannenbaum, who co-leads the $1.6-billion Broadleaf Wealth Management team, out of UBS last February was a lagging investment in technology, the adviser said.

“When cost-cutting is happening, it deeply impacts technology,” said Tannenbaum, who also joined Wells Fargo Advisors and has enjoyed the firm’s use of workflow products like Microsoft Planner. “On the waterfall down from there, it deeply impacts us, and then it deeply impacts our clients.”

Last year, wealth management saw record-high mergers and acquisitions, Berkshire Global Advisors reported in January, which can increase margin pressures and shift team culture, Munster said. 

For some advisers, leadership or ownership changes have made the independent registered investment adviser space more attractive. John Thiel, who headed Merrill Lynch’s wealth management until 2016, left the Bank of America-owned wirehouse two years ago to form the $1.4-billion Indivisible Partners. 

In October, Thiel told Wealth Management his team felt “stifled” at Merrill Lynch and sought out flexibility and innovation.

“We wanted a blank sheet of paper because there were a lot of things we couldn’t get done at a big organization, especially when we got acquired by a money center bank,” Thiel told the outlet.

The sector’s M&A action hasn’t shown signs of stopping. Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada recently announced plans to pursue acquisitions of U.S. wealth management firms, and Providence’s Citizens Private Bank is poaching talent from competitors across the country, including Beverly Hills-based Mike Shayestehfar in October. 

Acquisitions, private equity backing ramps up

Smaller practices increasingly struggle to manage compliance, keep up with the newest technology and shoulder operational burden, which drives consolidation, said Martine Lellis, executive managing partner for M&A partner development at Mercer Advisors. Denver-based Mercer is an aggressive RIA acquirer, folding in 18 firms in the last year, including Thousand Oaks-based Eagleson Arndt Financial Advisors earlier this month.

“We have a lot of sellers who come to us because they are just in a state of wearing a lot of hats,” she said.

In this year’s first quarter, private equity propelled RIA deal activity, blowing banks and other strategic buyers out of the water. The quarter’s 95 private equity-backed transactions were an all-time high and made up roughly 72% of all activity, according to a new report from Echelon Partners. 

The goals of private equity firms under pressure to drive investor returns and exits might diverge from advisers’ priorities, said Summer Hammons, chief people officer at Aspiriant. 

The employee-owned, Westwood-based wealth management firm has seen the ripple effects of private equity’s push into the sector: more advisers knocking at their door. 

“Advisers, in some of those environments, are just being asked to do things that they don’t think is the best way to serve their clients,” Hammons said. “We are starting to see advisers wanting to be at a place where they can make that long-term difference, and they can serve their clients in a way that’s really meaningful to them.”

The uptick in interest hasn’t yet translated to new adviser hires in L.A., though the firm has brought on four new partners so far this year.

Advisers want seat at the table, collaboration

Advisers look for “alignment” and the freedom to act in clients’ best interest, Hammons said.

Tom Metzger, head of private wealth advisers at Citizens Private Wealth, agrees. Wealth management professionals are entrepreneurial, and flock to growth-minded firms, Metzger said.

“It’s about being able to deliver more for their clients,” said Metzger, who helped launch the bank’s first two L.A.-based wealth management teams in Beverly Hills and El Segundo last fall. “It’s about being able to have more control over their own experience, and them having confidence in being able to deliver the promises that they make to clients.”

Operating somewhere between a boutique wealth manager and a large institutional bank, Citizens aims to attract advisers by giving them agency beyond picking from a menu of services, Metzger said. That includes tax and estate planning, asset management, and credit.

“We’re building and growing and refining our platform every day,” he said. “But how we do that is by listening to our teams and (asking), ‘What do you need today, what’s missing, and how do we adapt our platform to be able to meet your needs?’”

Effective integration across lines of business is another draw, advisers say. 

“Many of the large firms are very siloed, which makes it much harder to serve large and complex clients,” said Munster, who in six months at Wells has worked on a slew of cross-cutting deliverables. These have included arranging large real estate loans and advising high-growth consumer businesses and a leading physical artificial intelligence company with help from investment banking colleagues.

A firm’s capacity for collaborative, creative problem-solving is crucial, Tannenbaum said. The Broadleaf adviser likened the team environment at Wells to that of Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank at which he got his start. 

“We always say, ‘It’s just a math problem, we just need to figure out what the best solution is,’” he said, “and so when you can find those relationships that are willing to spend whatever hours need to be spent on finding a solution for a client, based upon the problem that they have, that’s meaningful.”

A recent “math problem” Tannenbaum faced was the assembly of a $1-billion loan for a client at Wells, which has pursued unimpeded balance sheet growth since the Federal Reserve lifted its $1.95-trillion asset cap last June.

“That’s nothing we could have ever done previously,” he said. “To be able to focus on exactly what clients were looking to do, get a group of people together at Wells, and creatively think about how to solve the problem was amazing.”