This Week in Wealth

Commonwealth reduced a $93m SEC penalty to just $5m. All it took was a seven-year legal battle and a new regime at the regulator. Plus, the CFP Board considers waiving its bachelor's degree requirement.

Ian and Alex discuss Edelman Financial Engines’ decision to award $175m in equity grants to its financial planners, the spate of lawsuits facing RIAs over client data breaches, and AlTi Global’s failure to meet its full-year earnings filing deadline.

Ian and Alex are joined by Citywire founder and chairman Lawrence Lever to discuss why US consolidators are looking across the pond to buy British wealth managers. These firms are cheap, compared to their US peers, so what's the catch?

They also cover Anthropic's endorsement of human financial advice and the key takeaways from Citywire's recent CEO Summit.

Ian, Alec, and Alex discuss two divergent deals from two of the largest RIAs in the market. Wealth Enhancement enters the support services game with its deal for FocusPoint Solutions, while Hightower edges away from that model, growing its Signature Wealth business by merging in $5bn Journey Strategic Wealth. Plus, Ric Edelman on how and why we might see a $1tn RIA.

If you want to keep track of all the M&A in the RIA market, take a look at our Deals Database.

Ian and Alex discuss the sale, or not, of listed wealth manager AlTi Global (formerly known as Tiedemann), plus Goldman Sachs’ plans to offer long-short SMAs to its RIA custody clients—a move that just happens to coincide with Fidelity putting an indefinite pause on such business. And Alec dials in to give an update on LPL’s partnership with Anthropic and whether this changes the conversation about AI’s impact on wealth management.