RIAs added 4.5 registered reps for every one the banks lost since 2021

Four and a half is the ratio worth holding onto, and it cuts in two directions at once: retail-focused RIAs picked up 4.5 registered representatives for every one the banks shed between 2021 and 2025 ^[1], which sounds like a rout until you run the same two figures the other way and find that 2,121 bank departures cannot fill 9,525 RIA seats, so banks supplied at most 22% of the channel's headcount gain ^[2][9]. The rest came from somewhere else. ISS's own caveat trims it further, since a FINRA registration is not a client relationship and many registered reps do mostly back-office work ^[10], which means the count overstates advisor movement on both sides.

The asset series is slower and much steadier. Cerulli's 21% to 27% over a decade ^[8] is six points, or 0.6 points a year ^[3], a 29% relative gain in share ^[4] that compounds into something large while never looking dramatic in any single twelve months. That is a durable one-way drift, and it is the number a recruiting pitch is implicitly borrowing when it says the model is winning.

Then there is what the receiving firm actually gets. Simon Quick's $10 billion across 91 employees is roughly $110 million of assets per head ^[5][5], with 35 of those 91 holding a CFP or CPA credential ^[6], which is a planning-heavy cost structure built over two decades under two names ^[14]. Managing Partner Chris Moore's remark that organic-channel relationships are frequently assigned to advisors who come on, and that this could happen with Justin Duke too ^[13], is the most economically revealing line in the story: the firm expects to feed the seat, not merely harvest a book that walks in the door.

The banks, for their part, may simply be doing arithmetic rather than making a mistake. Routing lower-balance prospects to centralized service offices ^[2] is a decision about cost to serve, and Moore's argument that private employee ownership spares Simon Quick the quarterly defence of margin to shareholders ^[12] describes, from the other side of the table, exactly why a listed bank keeps lifting minimums. What the bank gives up by doing that is the option on the client who grows; what it stops paying for is a human relationship priced below its own cost line.

American Banker's account carries no fee figure, no minimum threshold, and no dollar of client assets traced from a bank to an RIA; Duke's experience at BNY Wealth is one advisor's ^[1][3], and Will Trout of Datos Insights says repricing plus the lack of book ownership at banks accelerates departures ^[11][7]. If Cerulli's share stalls in the high twenties while rep counts keep climbing, the story is about where advisors work rather than where assets sit. If RIAs raise their own minimums as they scale, then the leeway Moore describes was a function of ownership structure and never a cheaper way to serve a small account.