In his 11 years at BNY Wealth, Justin Duke watched as fee increases priced out all but high net worth clients from the firm's trust and estate services.
Meanwhile, prospects with fewer investible assets were increasingly being routed to centralized "call center"-like offices, said Duke, now a managing director and client advisor in Dallas with the RIA Simon Quick Advisors.
"There's just a point in time in which the big banks want you to do more, more, more," said Duke, whose 25-year career also includes employment at Northern Trust and Regions Bank. "The banks are changing; the clients aren't."
Contrast that with the RIA he has moved to. Morristown, New Jersey-based Simon Quick has $10 billion in assets under management, 91 employees — including 28 certified financial planners and seven certified public accountants — and offices in places such as New York, Denver and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
More importantly, it has far fewer restraints on wealth managers working with mass affluent clients.
"How attractive can that be without all of the noise and without all of the headache and the constraints of 'Hey, I've got to leave my old clients behind," Duke said.
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Will Trout, the director of securities and investments at Datos Insights, said complaints like Duke's are fairly common. The fee hikes and rising asset minimums adopted by many banks, he said, send a simple message to advisors: "Your lower-balance clients aren't valuable anymore."
"For an advisor who built a book in the mass-affluent space, that's an exit signal," Trout said. "They can take those clients to an RIA, serve them better and actually own the relationship."
Duke's move from a large bank-based wealth advisor to an RIA is also in line with longstanding industry trends. The research firm Cerulli Associates reported in February that RIAs managed 27% of all assets in the industry in 2024, up from 21% a decade before.
Meanwhile from 2021 to 2025, RIAs built for working with retail investors gained 9,525 representatives registered with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, according to a report last year from the data firm ISS Market Intelligence. Banks lost 2,121.
To be sure, a registered representative isn't always someone who works with clients, manages assets and has other advisory-related responsibilities. Many registered reps hold FINRA licenses but perform mostly back-office functions.
Still, ISS's data corroborate advisors' long-running tendency to shift away from banks, wirehouses and other large institutions in favor of smaller RIAs and more independent firms. Simon Quick, for instance, was founded in 2004 and took on its current name in 2017
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Some who've left bank settings have complained that banks rarely give advisors
Then there are the higher fees and asset minimums for clients wanting certain services.
"Is repricing the only reason advisors leave? No," Trout said. "But combined with the lack of book ownership at banks, it's become a concrete grievance that accelerates departures."
Duke said he was attracted to Simon Quick and the RIA model in general by the lack of business pressures common at many larger firms.
"You get to a point where enough is enough, and then you hear this refreshing story," Duke said.
Managing Partner Chris Moore said Simon Quick's status as a privately held, employee-owned firm shields it from the relentless push for better profits that can be found at publicly traded banks and similar firms. Because RIAs don't have to defend their margins to shareholders every quarter, they have more leeway to take on clients whose asset tallies won't necessarily lead to big payouts.
"But, you know, maybe it's a great relationship for us over the long term that's going to grow, and they have a lot of planning opportunities, and it's strategic," Moore said. "Maybe they're going to
Banks are notorious for putting up legal obstacles to
Duke could very well spend most of his time working with clients he finds on his own or he obtains through referrals from Simon Quick.
"As a growing organization, if we continue to see growth from our organic channels, we frequently are assigning those relationships to advisors that come on," Moore said. "That could very well happen here too."
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Matching advisors to the RIA model
Simon Quick's openness to accepting different types of clients has enabled it to recruit advisors from firms as diverse as Merrill, Northern Trust and BNY. Moore said the firm usually is the most natural fit for advisors who don't make a large part of their revenue from commissions stemming from sales of annuities and similar products.
As an RIA with no broker-dealer affiliation, Simon Quick offers its services for fees meant to encourage ongoing planning relationships rather than one-off sales. That, too, gives someone like Duke greater leeway to select clients with an eye toward the long term rather than immediate profits.
"He can really go out and attract the clients he wants to attract and not have to turn down some that he thought would be perfect clients but couldn't fit in with other organizations," Moore said.
Moore said the firm now has six employees in Dallas and is planning to open an office there soon. The Dallas metropolitan area is particularly appealing because of its high concentration of entrepreneurs and residents looking to hand down wealth to heirs.
Simon Quick has achieved growth not only through recruiting but also acquisition deals. Last year, for instance,
Unlike many firms that pursue acquisitions, Simon Quick isn't obtaining financing for its deals from private equity. Rather, Moore said, it's relying on its cash flows, as well as debt when needed.
"Simon Quick's goal is to double as an organization every five years," Moore said. "And that's doing that thoughtfully and sticking to our vision and our mission and our core values."
