The story going around the industry is that Schwab’s grip on RIA custody is slipping. Schwab just raised the asset minimum for its referral network, a wave of new tech-first custodians like Altruist are pulling in thousands of advisors, and every conference panel this year has a slide about “custodian diversification.” Read enough of that coverage and you’d expect solo and small RIAs to be sprinting for the exits.
They’re not. Cerulli found that a quarter of RIAs are exploring a new custodian relationship, and in the same period only 4 percent of firms actually switched one. Most of what looks like custodian churn is firms adding a second relationship, not leaving the first. For a one-person practice with $15 to $25 million on the books, the real question was never who’s winning the market share war. It’s which custodian’s fee structure and minimums actually fit a shop that size, and on that question the answer has moved more than the headlines suggest.
Elena runs her practice alone out of a small office in Round Rock, custodied at Schwab since she went independent seven years ago. She’d never thought much about switching. Schwab had no minimum, the trading desk answered the phone, and moving a book of 60 households sounded like a year of paperwork for no obvious upside. Then two things landed in the same month. Schwab told her the referral network she’d been hoping to eventually qualify for now required clients with $2 million or more, up from $500,000, and a colleague mentioned Schwab was rolling out new per-trade charges on block trades that hadn’t existed before. Neither change affected her custody relationship directly. Both made her wonder, for the first time in years, whether she was still on the right platform or just the familiar one.
She spent a weekend reading comparison articles and came away more confused than when she started, because most of them were written for firms ten times her size. Those rankings compare wirehouse breakaway packages for a $500 million firm. What she actually needed was a way to test her specific setup against what each custodian charges and requires at her scale.
What Changed At Schwab And Why It Matters More For Solo Firms
Schwab still doesn’t charge a custody fee and still has no formal AUM minimum to open an account, and that hasn’t changed. What changed is the economics around the edges. The Schwab Advisor Network, the referral program that sends prospective clients to independent RIAs, raised its required assets per referred client to $2 million, up from the $500,000 minimum that had been in place since the program launched two decades ago, effective January 2026. A solo advisor managing $20 million across 60 mostly-under-$1-million households was never a realistic candidate for that referral flow to begin with, but the direction of the change tells you something: Schwab is narrowing its attention toward larger relationships, not smaller ones.
At the same time, Schwab now custodies roughly $3.7 trillion in RIA assets, an estimated 54 percent of the total market, according to Cerulli Associates. That scale is the whole reason Schwab still feels like the default. It’s also the reason a firm Elena’s size can start to feel like a rounding error to a custodian that size, which shows up less in outright poor service and more in a slow drift toward automated support channels and less flexibility on custom requests.
Where Fidelity Actually Sits For A Firm This Size
Fidelity gets mentioned in the same breath as Schwab constantly, and for a solo RIA that comparison mostly doesn’t apply. Fidelity has told firms it typically looks for a $30 million platform minimum before onboarding directly, and firms well under that threshold are usually steered toward joining an existing RIA already on the Fidelity platform rather than opening their own relationship. A firm at $18 to $22 million, which describes a large share of the solo practices we track, sits below that line more often than not.
That doesn’t make Fidelity irrelevant to this decision. It makes it a future-state conversation rather than a today conversation for most solo firms, worth revisiting once the practice crosses that AUM line through growth or a small acquisition, not something to spend a weekend evaluating right now.
The Altruist Numbers Behind The Hype
Altruist is the name that comes up whenever someone says the custody market is finally getting competitive again, and the growth backing that up is real. The company had just under 5,700 advisors on its platform as of late January 2026, making it the third-largest RIA custodian by advisor headcount even though it doesn’t disclose total assets under custody. The 2025 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, cited in Altruist’s own review of the results, put the company’s share of the custody market at 6.25 percent, up from 2.85 percent the year before, enough to move it into fourth place among custodians overall. The same survey found 10 to 20 percent of RIAs were actively exploring an alternative custodial relationship, citing technology, service quality, and operational efficiency as the drivers.
What that survey doesn’t say, and what the coverage tends to skip, is who’s actually moving. In our own data on RIA firms with a custodian identified in SEC Form ADV filings, Charles Schwab still shows up for 52 percent of the 426 firms with that field populated, and Altruist for 7 percent, roughly the same split among firms with a single advisor as among the group overall. The upstart is real and growing fast off a small base. It hasn’t come close to displacing the incumbent among firms Elena’s size, at least not yet.
Altruist isn’t the only name in that smaller-firm category either. TradePMR and Axos Advisor Services both court solo and small RIAs directly, with lower minimums and account-opening processes built for a firm placing a hundred trades a month instead of ten thousand. None of them show up in our custodian data with anywhere near the frequency of Schwab or Altruist, which says less about their quality and more about how new most of these relationships still are relative to a Schwab account that’s been in place for a decade or more.
The Custodian Fit Test We Actually Run
For a firm under $30 million with one or two advisors, the custodian comparison articles built for billion-dollar breakaways mostly don’t apply, so we use a shorter version, three questions in order, and stop as soon as one of them changes the answer.
One. Does the new fee or minimum touch your actual account, or just a program you were never going to qualify for. Elena’s SAN eligibility never mattered to her core custody relationship. Reading the announcement as a reason to reconsider Schwab entirely would have been solving a problem she didn’t have.
Two. What does trading actually cost at your volume. A block-trade fee that’s a rounding error at $500 million can matter more at $20 million if the firm trades often, so the real number to ask for is the estimated annual cost at the account’s actual trade volume. The published fee schedule alone won’t tell you that.
Three. What do you lose in service quality by staying versus what you’d lose in migration friction by leaving. Cerulli’s research on custodian transitions has found firms typically lose a meaningful share of client assets during a switch, mostly from clients who don’t complete the paperwork or use the disruption as a moment to reconsider the relationship entirely. That cost is real and it’s the reason so few firms actually follow through on the custodians they say they’re exploring.
Elena ran her numbers through this test and stayed at Schwab. Her SAN eligibility change was noise. Her trade volume at Schwab’s new block fee added up to about $340 a year, not nothing but not worth a migration. What moved her needle was smaller than a custodian switch: she asked her service team directly about the block-trade change and got a fee waiver most solo advisors don’t know to ask for. The headline story was “advisors are leaving Schwab.” Her actual story was a five-minute phone call.
What This Means If You’re Weighing A Switch
None of this means Schwab is right for every firm or that Altruist and its peers aren’t worth a serious look, especially for a newer practice built without the sunk cost of an existing Schwab relationship and without SEC-registered assets tied up in an old custody agreement. It means the decision for a firm under $30 million usually isn’t the custodian, it’s the specific line item that triggered the question in the first place, and running that line item through the fit test above usually answers it faster than reading another comparison guide written for a firm you aren’t.
Our goal is to help RIA owners make decisions sized to the firm they actually run. The trade press writes for a different one. How to choose a custodian for your RIA takes the other route, the criteria to weigh when you are picking one from the start rather than second-guessing the one you have.
Custodian selection is one piece of the operating side of a firm. We write about staffing, overhead, and growth more broadly on our practice management page.
Picking the wrong custodian rarely blows up a firm on its own. It just adds friction to everything downstream. That kind of outside read is part of what Ritz Stevens membership looks like day to day.
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