Schwab Advisor Services is reporting a 54% leap in the number of advisor teams who joined the company in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year.

In fact, 74 advisors teams came over to Schwab in the first six months of this year; with 36 teams making the switch in the second quarter and 38 teams in the first quarter, according to Barnaby Grist, senior managing director of strategic business development at Schwab Advisor Services. “The big change this year was that 40% of the 74 teams went to existing firms” rather than creating their own firm, Grist says. Last year, only 10% to 15% of the teams that joined Schwab went to existing firms.

The dramatic jump reflects a growing trend of the independent and registered investment advisor (RIA) channels grabbing a greater share of the financial advisor market from the wirehouses. And, more advisors are choosing the independent and RIA model—no matter how good or bad the financial markets are performing, Grist says.

Last year, about two-thirds of the teams who joined Schwab came from wirehouses, with only a couple coming from regional firms, Grist says. He expects the numbers to be about the same this year as well.  

According to Schwab Advisor Services research, in 2008, registered investment advisers or RIAs, brought in over $108 billion of net new assets into the three largest custodians. By comparison, the four major Wall Street brokerage firms—Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley and UBS—saw an outflow of $8 billion in 2008.

Part of Schwab’s particular allure is its experience with the transition process. It moved more than 120 teams last year. “We’ve made all the mistakes already so the transition can be close to perfect,” Grist says.

After all, he adds, making such a big move isn’t just a job change, “It’s a life decision.”

But this year, of those who made this decision, “some of them were in a hurry to get out of the wirehouses because of bad behavior on the part of their employers, bad behavior that put their clients at risk and their businesses at risk,” Grist says. At the same time, he adds, those teams desperate to escape “didn’t have time to start their own firm.”

One wirehouse advisor who joined Schwab this year, wanted to have conference calls for his 150 clients, Grist says. The calls would have allowed the advisor to talk to all his customers at once about their concerns and fears about the impact of the global economic crisis on their portfolios. But the advisor’s compliance department at the wirehouse stopped the calls. “Funnily enough, that’s a best practice, here at Schwab,” Grist says.

For advisors seeking to leave their traditional firms, Schwab stepped in and acted as matchmaker. Calling his firm a sort of “eHarmony for financial advisors,” Grist says that Schwab has been sponsoring two types of events. One is for those who want to join an existing RIA. “We listen to our existing advisors and figure out whether they are ready to bring on new people,” Grist says. Some of the issues that have to be reviewed are governance, ownership and compensation. The other type of event is for those who want to start their own RIA.

Those who came over this year to Schwab, a San Francisco-based provider of custodial, operational and trading support for more than 5,700 registered investment advisors, were primarily small teams of two or so advisors with a couple of office assistants, Grist says. He predicts that larger teams will be signing up in the second half of the year as the economy picks up.