Steward CEO says RIA deal volume runs up to 5x tracked totals

RIA deal volume runs at three to five times what industry trackers publish, Steward Partners CEO Jim Gold told InvestmentNews, because advisor-to-advisor book sales and internal succession moves go unreported.

DeVoe & Company tallied a record 322 RIA deals in 2025 and 244 through September 2026, slightly ahead of last year's pace even though third-quarter volume fell 17% year over year. Echelon Partners tracked 466 RIA deals in 2025 under a broader methodology that also counts capital infusions, restructurings and breakaway transactions, while DeVoe counts only announced RIA mergers and acquisitions. Fidelity puts the median size of an acquired RIA at $630 million in the first half of 2026, up from $517 million in the same period a year earlier, and Advisor Growth Strategies' RIA Deal Room Report puts the median multiple paid at 11.6x EBITDA in 2025.

For an RIA below $100 million in client assets, the published 11.6x EBITDA multiple is a benchmark built on much larger firms. Joseph Glick, Steward's chief operating officer since July 2026, said terms surface for larger marquee transactions but not for smaller deals or the succession work Steward does with other firms. Jeff Gonyo, Steward's head of wealth management, said anything under $100 million in client assets "is not getting picked up anywhere," and he said most RIAs sit in that lower-volume space.

Steward's own 12-month tally puts the unreported share near 40%, not the three-to-five-times Gold estimates for the market. Gonyo said the firm logged 16 to 17 publicly reported deals in the past 12 months alongside roughly a dozen internal transactions that do not get announced, making the total near 1.7 times the reported count. Gold's higher range is a market-wide estimate rather than a count of Steward's own book.

Steward is a Connecticut-based hybrid RIA with $57 billion in client assets and $475 million in strategic capital from Ares secured in December 2025. Gold said the unreported flow includes advisors who want to sell their books back to the company after a decade, plus peer-to-peer sales that independent firms' succession groups broker between advisors; those transactions involve no investment bank and no public announcement.