Ron Medley, Director of Wealth Management at Berthel Fisher Companies, keeps a client folder dated July 1, 1998. The relationship began with a cold-calling survey, a standard prospecting channel of that era, and his firm shared the upfront cost of the lead. Nearly three decades later, the mediums are unrecognizable, but the challenge is unchanged.
“Finding someone with a front-burner issue worth a targeted, intentional conversation is still what an advisor is paying for,” Medley says. “The online and AI tools have simply changed the medium and how people process concepts.”
It remains a problem the industry hasn’t solved at scale. Schwab’s 2026 RIA Benchmarking Study found that while firms posted AUM growth of 16.6% to 19.6% in 2025, net asset flows contributed just 4.8 and 7.2 percentage points, respectively. The market did most of the work. Organic growth remains the scarce commodity, which helps explain why firms are receptive to new ways of paying for it.
What has started to change is the payment structure itself. Prospecting technology has traditionally been priced as software, with a flat subscription billed regardless of results. Some wealthtech providers now take a different approach, pairing a low monthly fee with an ongoing share of the new assets the platform helps bring in. The case for the model is straightforward. It removes the upfront cost that can keep smaller practices from investing in growth, and the vendor gets paid when the advisor wins. Revenue sharing tied to client acquisition also has precedent in our industry, with custodian referral programs having operated on comparable economics for years.
The unsettled question is narrower than the model itself. When a vendor’s compensation continues after the introduction, what ongoing value should justify it and when should it end?
The Economics Turn on an End Date
Medley is quick to note that investing in advisor growth is a healthy industry tradition, and one he has lived on both sides of.
“I grew up with a firm investing in me, and we work to do the same for our advisors today,” he says. “A revenue share can lower the upfront cost of growth, but only when the vendor keeps providing value and the obligation has a sunset. Without one, advisors are giving up the ability to scale and giving away equity to save a little money on the front end.”
The distinction he draws is between paying for a service and ceding a long-term claim. An introduction happens once. A revenue share with no end date turns that single event into a lasting claim on the client relationship, and the claim compounds as the client’s assets grow. A longstanding custodian program illustrates how ongoing compensation can be anchored to ongoing value. Under the Schwab Advisor Network, participating advisors pay a fee calculated on referred assets held in custody at Schwab using a declining asset-based scale. For assets maintained at or transferred to another custodian, a one-time transfer fee applies. The fee structure is tied to the continuing custody relationship, and there is a defined mechanism for when that relationship changes. Advisors evaluating a revenue-share arrangement should look for the same certainty, whether through a sunset, a cap or a defined buyout, and should model the cost over a 10-year horizon rather than judging the monthly fee.
Inside the Relationship, or Outside It
From the vendor side, Rylan Folts, co-founder and head of sales at WealthFeed, an AI-powered prospecting and organic growth platform for advisors, understands why the model is finding an audience.
“The appeal is easy to see,” Folts says. “Almost nothing upfront, and the vendor gets paid when a client lands.”
The question is whether that alignment holds up in practice. Folts points to a structural difference between the custodian precedent and newer prospecting models.
“Custodian referral programs work partly because the custodian sits inside the relationship,” Folts says. “It holds the assets, sees the transfers, keeps account-level records and makes a direct, documented introduction.”
A prospecting platform sits outside the relationship, and that difference is where the practical questions begin. Technology-enabled outreach can be automated and run at scale, which means a touch can land on someone the advisor already knew, a referral in progress or a lead from another channel entirely.
“How the vendor establishes that it sourced a relationship, and who resolves it when the advisor disagrees, should be answered before anyone signs,” Folts says.
Clear attribution gives both sides a common record of how the client relationship began.
“The arrangements that hold up are the ones with a documented handoff and attribution both sides can audit,” Folts says. “If the vendor can show exactly how a relationship started, most of these disputes never happen.”
The Compliance View
From a supervision standpoint, an arrangement in which a vendor holds a continuing economic interest in a client relationship deserves review before adoption, and it warrants evaluation as a compensation arrangement rather than ordinary software spend. Firms should understand exactly what is being compensated and for how long. They should know what gets disclosed to the client and by whom, how attribution is documented, how payments are audited and how the advisor’s communications and data flow through the platform. Whether a given arrangement resembles a referral or promotional relationship in the eyes of a regulator will depend on its facts, and that is precisely the analysis firms should run with counsel before approval rather than after a dispute.
The hard cases deserve particular attention. What happens when an advisor changes firms, terminates the software or disputes a lead while sourced clients remain on the books? What happens when the practice sells and the buyer inherits payments to a vendor it did not select? None of these scenarios has a standard industry answer yet. Resolving those questions in writing before signing can prevent problems for both the firm and its advisors, while giving the vendor greater certainty as well.
Who Owns the Long-Term Economics
Outcome-based pricing has a legitimate place in advisor prospecting. Aligning a vendor’s compensation with an advisor’s success is a reasonable instinct, and for practices without the budget to fund growth upfront, it can open a door that a subscription keeps closed.
For Medley, the evaluation starts with a firm knowing its own intent.
“A home office should ask what kind of growth it wants to encourage,” he says. “Is the goal simply to generate more production today, or to help advisors build durable equity over time?”
A growth tool can earn its place by lowering the cost of acquiring clients. The question that follows is who holds the long-term economics once the client is acquired.
“Firms should examine whether the arrangement supports advisor enterprise value, or quietly transfers part of that value to a vendor that made an introduction years earlier,” Medley says.
Advisors built this industry on relationships that outlast any single technology decision. The economics of the tools they use to grow should account for that.
Sander Ressler is Managing Director of Essential Edge Compliance Outsourcing Services, LLC, a strategic consultancy specializing in compliance and regulatory affairs for broker-dealers and registered investment advisers (RIAs).
Essential Edge is a Strategic Partner Firm of the Ascentix Partners Network, the alliance of elite consultancies with a shared expertise and commitment to driving wealth management enterprise growth.