With an increasingly saturated US market, some mega-RIAs are looking abroad for clients and acquisitions, testing if the independent advice model can thrive internationally.
After years of growth through M&A consolidation at home, US-based mega-RIAs are setting their sights on the next frontier. With the US market increasingly mature, firms are looking abroad for untapped client opportunities and testing whether the independent advice model can thrive beyond American borders.
San Francisco-based RIA consultant DeVoe & Company noted in its latest report that this year’s third quarter was the most active quarter in RIA dealmaking history, at 94 transactions. As private equity capital fuels soaring valuations stateside, firms bargain-hunting overseas could scoop up RIAs for throwback prices, M&A advisor Jessica Polito tells InvestmentNews.
“I think the M&A market stateside is so saturated that other, especially English-speaking, countries abroad are an untapped opportunity,” says Polito, founder of M&A advisory Turkey Hill Management. “They haven’t been the recipients of outreach for the last 10 years the way US-based RIAs have, and because there’s been less deal activity, multiples are probably lower. There’s probably opportunity to snap up big or small firms for prices that we were seeing maybe five, 10 years ago that you just can’t do here anymore.”
Emily Blue, co-founder of the sell-side M&A advisory firm Hue Partners, says that the industry will “continue to see more global M&A activity in the coming years.” Interest in managing overseas wealth comes as an estimated 1,285 US citizens moved abroad in the first quarter of 2025, marking a 102 percent increase compared with the last quarter of 2024, according to consulting firm CS Global Partners.
“RIAs in the United States are significantly more advanced than their counterparts globally, and many are now exploring international opportunities as a natural extension of their business,” Blue tells InvestmentNews. “The RIA market has always strived to meet clients wherever they are, and as more clients consider life abroad, it’s increasingly important for RIAs to be positioned globally.”
Large RIAs headquartered in the United States undergoing targeted expansion abroad include Corient, AlTi Tiedemann Global, and Focus Financial Partners. Both AlTi Tiedemann Global and Focus Financial Partners trade publicly on NASDAQ, while Corient and its parent firm CI Financial were taken private last year via acquisition by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala.
Corient owns over 260 RIAs with more than 1,300 total employees managing approximately $216 billion in client assets. The Miami-headquartered firm ignited its global expansion last month via acquisitions of UK-based wealth managers Stonehage Fleming and Stanhope Capital Group, bringing more than $214 billion collective assets to Corient and access to clients across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
“Because of the fragmented nature of the US, we were able to build a business and create scale through a series of smaller, micro-acquisitions. Europe is a very different dynamic where it was the opposite strategy – we ended up buying literally number one and number two in the market at the same time,” says Corient CEO Kurt MacAlpine. “It’s a very top-heavy market, so you want to make sure that you’re buying and accumulating scale with the best talent.”
Another factor in Corient’s strategy for European wealth managers is the expansive variance of time zones, regulators, currencies, and languages. “I have one compensation model that everybody is effectively in domestically, and we’re going to be extending that to Europe,” MacAlpine adds, as part of Corient’s unified approach for its global operations.
Focus Financial, whose network firms manage over $450 billion in client assets, has centered its international expansion efforts on growing in both Canada and Australia.
AlTi Tiedemann maintains almost an even split of 10 offices in the US compared to nine internationally across the UK, Lisbon, Paris, Switzerland, Milan, and Hamburg, Germany, as well as Singapore and Hong Kong. The firm’s international expansion began in 2019 via a move into Zurich, while it most recently acquired the $15 billion German multi-family office Kontora in March. AlTi totals $31 billion in assets under management outside the US, the firm’s president and chief operating officer Kevin Moran tells InvestmentNews.
“We really think that the path of the wealth management industry will increasingly become a global one,” says Moran. “We really believe that being global will be key to having success servicing the ultra-high-net-worth demographic. We believe the families that are ultra-high-net-worth will increasingly themselves become global – they want to invest globally, they will have family members living in and outside of the United States, or international families will have family members living in more than one country over time.”
Moran notes AlTi’s presence in Switzerland, given the nation’s favorable regulations, enables AlTi to serve cross-border clients across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. “We don’t necessarily need to have offices in every single part of the world,” he says. “The Middle East is a dynamic growing market, and an ultra-high-net-worth business is an obvious place that we should be paying attention to and looking to be relevant in, so we will certainly look to do that,” Moran says.
Expanding overseas requires expertise in that country’s local investment scene, regulations, and tax law, while advisory firms in the US also have to invest heavily in technology and operational resources to maintain a global workforce. But not all mega-RIAs stateside are yet sold on the appeal of international markets.
“Hightower has no plans to expand internationally at this time,” says a spokesperson for the Chicago-based Hightower RIA that manages over $324 billion in client assets with over 100 advisory practices across 36 states. “Our priority is empowering our advisors to deliver an unmatched client experience while continuing to add growth-minded practices across the US.”
