Independent RIA Platforms Explained: Custodians, Aggregators, and Supported Independence

The short answer: There is no such thing as "an RIA platform." There are five layers wearing the same label: custodians (Schwab alone holds $5.5 trillion for 16,000-plus RIAs, mostly without stated custody fees), supported-independence platforms (10 to 20% of your revenue for a turnkey middle office), independent broker-dealers with corporate RIAs (hybrid convenience, consolidating fast), PE-backed aggregators (equity for your practice, often with a W-2), and the do-it-yourself standalone RIA (about $25,000 to launch, plus the operational lift). Every pitch you will hear is selling one of these five. The diligence starts with knowing which one.

Advisors searching for platforms are usually three conversations deep before anyone explains the map. Here it is, layer by layer, with the verified numbers.

Layer one: custodians, the free-looking foundation

Whatever you build, client assets sit at a custodian, and this market has a clear shape.

Schwab dominates. Schwab Advisor Services provides custody, clearing, and trading for $5.5 trillion in client assets across a network of more than 16,000 RIA firms. Fidelity's institutional arm, the clear number two, reports 3,300-plus wealth management firms on its platform. Pershing brings clearing heritage and a bank-adjacent model, and the challenger story is Altruist, which jumped from tenth to fourth in custodian rankings on a 111.7% surge in net new relationships. Nearly 30% of RIAs, more than 6,200 firms, now custody with two or more providers.

"Free" is a pricing model, not a price. Financial Planning's reporting on Schwab's economics describes roughly 2,000 distinct fee structures across those 16,000 firms, individually negotiated, with many RIAs paying no stated custody fee at all because the custodian monetizes client cash sweeps and lending. New wrinkles appear at the margins, like a $5 per-transaction charge on unusually large block trades introduced in mid-2026. The lesson for a founder: your custody agreement is a negotiation, your clients' cash is the consideration, and multi-custody exists partly to keep both honest.

Layer two: supported independence, the rented chassis

Between doing everything yourself and staying an employee sits the fastest-growing model of the last decade: platform firms that rent you an institutional infrastructure.

What they charge is well documented. The long-standing benchmark is 10 to 20% of the fees an advisor collects, structured as a revenue share or basis points on assets. Dynasty Financial Partners, the category's flagship, disclosed math in its own growth report: an all-in cost around 15% of revenue, delivering a net payout of roughly 62% to RIA owners, versus the 5 to 11% of revenue a firm might spend assembling a custodian-based stack itself. Dynasty-affiliated RIAs grew at a 14.3% five-year compound rate against 6.4% for comparable independents, which is the argument for the spread in one statistic.

What the category looks like. Sanctuary Wealth reports more than 120 partner firms and roughly $50 billion on platform, owns a broker-dealer for hybrid business, and acquired tru Independence; its May 2025 launch of 1280 Financial Partners, a $2 billion, eight-partner team out of UBS, is the model working at wirehouse-team scale. The category's pitch is speed and credibility on day one; the price is a durable revenue share and, in some arrangements, the platform's growing role in your future liquidity decisions.

Layer three: independent broker-dealers and the corporate RIA

For practices keeping commission business, the hybrid lane runs through an IBD's corporate RIA: you affiliate as a 1099 contractor, own your book, and rent the broker-dealer's ADV, compliance, and platform. LPL runs about 29,000 advisors and $1.7 trillion. Osaic administers roughly $712 billion across about 11,000 professionals; Cetera runs more than $625 billion. Raymond James Financial Services offers the same structure with a distinctive twist: the same firm also runs an employee channel, so advisors can change models without changing firms.

The 2025-26 lesson in this lane is consolidation risk. LPL announced its $2.7 billion acquisition of Commonwealth Financial Network, a firm with 2,900 advisors and $285 billion known for boutique service, in March 2025, closed it in August, and scheduled platform conversion for late 2026, targeting 90% retention. Independent tracking tells the rest: 654 Commonwealth advisors, roughly 22.5% of headcount, departed within nine months of the announcement, about a third of them landing at Raymond James' independent channel, which recruited close to $2 billion of those client assets by running toward the disruption. The takeaway for platform shoppers is not that any one firm is wrong; it is that in this lane, your platform can be bought, and your diligence should price that possibility. Our boutique-RIA risk analysis covers the same dynamic from the other side.

Layer four: aggregators and equity pitches

The newest layer talks like independence and papers like an acquisition.

PE-backed rollups such as Arax Investment Partners, backed by RedBird Capital, have assembled more than $30 billion across platform-owned RIA divisions through eleven acquisitions in three years. Advisors join a division; the platform owns the RIA.

W-2 aggregators such as Steward Partners, $32 billion in client assets, employee-majority-owned, typically bring advisors in on a W-2 basis with equity as part of the transaction, and have added models over time, including 1099 affiliation and a legacy-acquisition division whose stated aim is buying whole practices.

There is nothing wrong with these economics, and for advisors seeking liquidity plus a platform they can be excellent. But categorize them correctly: they are buyers. The consideration is cash and equity, the structure typically involves employment agreements and multi-year commitments, and what you are selling is some or all of the practice's future enterprise value, the asset whose open-market pricing we covered in our independent-versus-global-brokerage comparison. An equity pitch is an offer sheet, and it should be diligenced like one.

Layer five: the standalone RIA, built from scratch

The purest form of independence: register your own firm, control your own ADV, assemble the stack yourself.

The cash cost is smaller than the folklore. Published estimates put the average launch around $25,000, ranging from several thousand dollars to over $50,000: formation filings, registration, errors-and-omissions coverage, an initial technology stack commonly $3,000 to $9,000, marketing, and a prudent cash reserve for the transition months. There is no minimum AUM to register.

The real costs are operational. Registration timelines, vendor selection, compliance program build-out, and the months where you are chief everything officer while your book transfers. That lift, not the $25,000, is why the other four layers exist, and why the honest question is never can you build it but whether building it is the best use of your next eighteen months. The channel-level version of that decision, employee versus contractor versus owner, is mapped in Going Independent: What Are My Options and W-2 vs 1099.

How do you choose a layer?

The market's direction is not in doubt: Cerulli has independent and hybrid RIAs at 27% of industry assets and climbing, with 71% of switching advisors choosing independence. The open question is only where on the ownership spectrum you belong, and it reduces to three trades.

Economics against lift. Standalone keeps the most and demands the most. Supported independence hands back 10 to 20 points of revenue for institutional speed. Corporate RIAs and aggregators trade further economics for further convenience or liquidity.

Control against certainty. Owning your ADV means no one converts your platform out from under you. Renting one means someone might; the Commonwealth advisors who moved this year can brief you on how that feels.

Liquidity now against equity later. Aggregator checks are real, and so is the enterprise value you no longer own afterward.

We help advisors run this exact layer-by-layer diligence, custodian negotiations, platform fee sheets, aggregator offer terms, against their actual book and growth plans. If you are being pitched a platform this quarter and want to know which layer it is and what it should cost, request an introduction. The map above is the industry's; the route should be yours.