Fee Income Increasing Across Advisor Channels, Finds Cogent Study

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Advisors in all channels saw fee income increase as a percentage of their compensation over the past year, according to a new study.

Advisors nationwide reported that asset-based fees increased as a portion of their compensation to 59% this year, up from 56% last year. That's according to the annual Advisor Brandscape survey of 1,749 advisors by Cambridge, Mass.-based market research consulting firm Cogent Research, now owned by Market Strategies International. That number is expected to increase to 66% by 2015, the study found.

“We saw that advisors [nationwide] are increasingly reliant on fee-based compensation,” says Meredith Rice, a senior director at Market Strategies.

Fee income among RIAs, which represent 300 of the survey subjects, stayed roughly steady at 84%, the study found. That number is expected to drop to 83% by 2015, a statistically insignificant decline, according to Rice. 

“There’s an increase across all broker-dealer channels,” she said, “whereas RIAs are already there” at high levels of fee-based income.

 

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