The Wire

Chalice Financial Network is upping the stakes in the competitive platform provider market.

Chalice has acquired Succession Link, an online matching service for RIAs looking to buy or sell their firms, and has forged a strategic alliance with Oak Street Funding, a bank subsidiary that provides commercial financing for financial service businesses.

Baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were known as the “M&M Boys” when they were hitting home runs for the New York Yankees in the 1960s.

A half-century later, the RIA business has their own pair of “M&M” sluggers —Mariner Wealth Advisors and Mercer Advisors. In November alone, the two firms demonstrated their considerable M&A prowess, snapping up four advisory firms with over $3 billion in combined assets under management.

If you want to become a multibillion dollar advisory firm, be prepared to make some hard decisions.

Principals committed to growing their RIA into an enterprise firm need to recognize the difference between management and leadership, said Brent Brodeski, CEO of Savant Capital Management.

“Management is telling people what to do,” Brodeski told advisors at a session titled “The Road to a Multi-billion Dollar Firm: Pushing Past Challenges and Setbacks” at Charles Schwab’s annual IMPACT conference. “Leadership is having a vision and attracting people to it.”

AssetMark, the industry's third-largest turnkey asset management provider, hit the $50 billion mark by agreeing to buy Global Financial Private Capital, a $5.7 billion RIA that provides outsourcing services to around 200 advisors.

Although the TAMP business is dominated by Envestnet with over $500 billion advisor assets on its platform, AssetMark, headed by Charles Goldman, former head of Schwab Institutional and president of Fidelity's clearing and custody business, is making an aggressive push to catch number two SEI Advisor Network, which has around $65 billion in assets.

The industry may be adding registered investment advisers annually, but it's also consolidating at a record pace for one reason: the power of scale. Highly competitive,, aggressive growth RIAs are reshaping the landscape.

Armed with capital, they are harvesting RIAs seeking to sell or breakaways that don't want the burden of running their own firms. It seems that every week, another RIA joins the $1 billion club. I fully expect the emergence of a dozen or more very large regional and national RIAs.

Shirl Penney bounded onto the scene in 2011 with the then novel proposition of being home to big breakaway stock brokers as they began life as RIAs, but with one big difference from roll-ups. He asked for no ownership stake. See: What exactly is Dynasty Financial Partners and why is the Smith Barney execs' startup gaining so much attention?

Seven years later, the CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners is using a novel pitch to pursue another new market -- existing RIAs with AUM starting at $1 billion, but lacking the nous to take the next step. The bet is that Dynasty is primed for an upmarket move and that big RIAs are ready for the tough-love advice and expanded "synthetic" scale that the firm will deliver.