July 07, 2026 — Wealth management firms are making big investments in digital solutions and other tools intended to drive growth strategies. But, the success or failure of those investments often comes down to a single factor unrelated to the quality of the tools: Do the firm’s advisors have the motivation and ability to expand their individual practices?
New research from PriceMetrix—now part of Crisil Coalition Greenwich—helps wealth managers answer that question by identifying the behaviors top-performing advisors employ to achieve growth, and using that information to project the future growth prospects of individual advisors.
“High-performing advisors have both the will and the skill needed to attract new clients and expand their practices,” says Kieran Bol, Director of Research & Analytics at PriceMetrix and coauthor of Growing AUM in advisor practices: The will and the skill. “High-performing wealth management firms know what makes their top performers successful and understand how to cultivate more.”
Achieving Sustainable Organic Growth
From a top-line view, wealth managers don’t appear to have a growth problem. Over the past decade, assets under management (AUM) by North American wealth managers more than doubled, representing an annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 10%.
However, much of that growth can be attributed to market performance gains from an historically long bull market. The PriceMetrix report estimates that organic (non-market driven) growth accounts for only 3% of industry AUM growth per year.
With financial markets entering a new phase of uncertainty, wealth managers are working to find more sustainable strategies designed to fuel organic growth. To help firms and advisors develop a more reliable roadmap for growth, PriceMetrix tapped into its deep reservoir of proprietary data drawn from 80,000 North American wealth management practices to find the biggest drivers of AUM growth.
The research revealed that top performers grow their practices four times faster than bottom-performing advisors, even adjusting for size of book and tenure. After identifying the practices and strategies used by top-performers to generate those results, PriceMetrix distilled these behaviors into a “growth propensity score” that accurately predicts the future growth of advisors. The higher the score, the more likely the practice will grow.
For advisors, this new tool creates a simplified roadmap for growth at every career stage, since the propensity score reveals what top performers at each stage are focused on to drive performance.
For firms, this type of analytical tool can strengthen the will to grow as well. Many wealth managers now use analytic tools that enable them to quantify and rank the growth potential of individual advisors and share those results with their advisor field. This type of “gamification” of growth performance instills natural competition, and it is often more palatable for firms than direct compensation adjustments.
“Wealth managers can also leverage our growth analytics to make smarter choices in recruiting. Getting it right is paramount with the size of the financial commitment at play,” says Nathaniel Brown, Relationship Director at PriceMetrix.
Growing AUM in advisor practices: The will and the skill explains how wealth management advisors and firms can understand the underlying behaviors that lead to outperformance and use that knowledge to drive sustainable organic growth.