Phill Rogerson has been paying close attention. As Senior Vice President and Head of the RIA Channel for AssetMark, he spends his days talking to advisors—and what he’s hearing paints a clear picture of an industry at an inflection point.
Clients want more. More personalization, more tax sensitivity, broader advice across a wider range of financial concerns—and they want all of the service to feel bespoke. Meanwhile, the advisors fielding those requests are running businesses with finite hours, finite staff, and very real operational constraints. The gap between what clients expect and what any one human being can deliver is widening by the year.
In a conversation with The Wealth Advisor’s Scott Martin, Rogerson doesn’t frame the challenge as a crisis. He sees it as a forcing function. “The demands of wealth managers’ clients are really increasing the burden on financial advisors to deliver higher levels of personalization, more tax sensitivity in terms of the advice that they’re giving, broader advice over a number of different topic areas,” he explains, “and all having to do this in the context of having to scale efficiently.”
The advisors who figure out how to close that gap—who find the right partners, platforms, and processes—are going to be extraordinarily well positioned. The ones who don’t will find themselves squeezed between rising client expectations and a competitive market that isn’t standing still.
Supply, Demand, and the Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight
The macro picture for financial advice is, by almost any measure, remarkable. Demand is surging. More Americans are seeking professional guidance than ever before, and the pool of advisors available to serve them is shrinking fast. Cerulli Associates reports that nearly 100,000 advisors plan to retire over the next decade—roughly 37.5% of the industry’s total headcount, collectively managing more than 41% of all industry assets. Meanwhile, the number of households actively seeking financial advice continues to climb, and the divergence between supply and demand is only expected to widen.
For the advisory firms that are ready, the runway ahead is long. Rogerson sees the moment clearly. “Who can dispute the level of opportunity in the industry today when you’re talking about a world where, number one, the supply of really qualified advisors is dwindling as many are retiring and the demand for advice is higher than it’s ever been?” he posits.
What separates the firms that capture the opportunity from the ones that don’t will come down, in large part, to infrastructure. Even historically smaller, relationship-focused practices now need to think seriously about scalability—about which partners they work with, what technology they deploy, and how they stay competitive against firms with far greater resources. Choosing those partners well has never mattered more.
AssetMark, Adhesion, and the Case for Partnership
AssetMark’s acquisition of Adhesion Wealth in 2022 brought two complementary capabilities under one roof, and the combination has driven serious investment in the Adhesion platform ever since. AssetMark manages more than $170 billion in assets and works with tens of thousands of advisors—a scale that generates deep, real-world perspective on what advisors need. Adhesion channels the investment power and institutional know-how of its parent company into a managed account platform built specifically for RIAs.
In its simplest form, Adhesion is a managed account platform with outsourced trading. But the implications of those capabilities are significant. The platform offers full open architecture across more than 300 managers and nearly 2,000 managed account products, giving advisors broad flexibility in portfolio construction without surrendering oversight or control. The operational complexity—the trading, the rebalancing, the execution—is handled. The advisor can stay focused on what differentiates their business: the quality of client relationships and the depth of advice they’re able to deliver.
Rogerson is equally emphatic that technology alone isn’t the key differentiator. “Many firms in the industry opt to compete purely on the basis of their technology,” he says, “but I think where we can really make a difference in the marketplace is in the quality of our service and the quality of our services.”
AssetMark’s strong Net Promoter Scores are a feature Rogerson points to with pride, seeing this metric of customer satisfaction as a genuine reflection of how advisors experience working with the firm. The ambition is to consolidate that service culture at Adhesion as the two entities continue to integrate.
Tax Optimization: Where the Numbers Get Interesting
Of the capabilities Rogerson highlights for the year ahead, the launch of Adhesion’s tax overlay programdraws the most enthusiasm—and the numbers behind this service are hard to ignore.
Tax overlay isn’t a new concept. The idea of systematically harvesting losses, managing cost basis, and aligning portfolio implementation with a client’s tax situation has been discussed in the industry for years. What has lagged, historically, is execution. Not every program optimizes with the same frequency. Not every program handles replacement securities with the same sophistication. The delta between a well-built tax overlay and a mediocre implementation shows up, eventually, in after-tax returns.
Rogerson’s confidence in Adhesion’s program stems partly from its track record on the AssetMark side of the business, where it’s been live for more than a year. “In 2025, on average, that program generated almost 150 basis points per account in enhanced after-tax return,” he notes.
For advisors who field questions about fees, nearly 150 basis points of demonstrable after-tax value is a compelling answer. “Any advisor can justify their almost entire fee on one service that we’re able to provide,” Rogerson says.
The mechanics behind the number are worth understanding. Adhesion’s tax overlay runs with daily optimization, meaning the system isn’t reviewing accounts monthly or quarterly and catching missed opportunities—it’s scanning continuously. Dynamic identification of replacement securities means the program can harvest a loss without leaving a client exposed to a gap in market exposure. And advisors retain meaningful control, with full flexibility to define the parameters of tax optimization based on each client’s specific goals and circumstances.
Personalization at scale has always been the conceptual goal of managed account technology. Tax optimization is one of the clearest, most quantifiable ways to deliver on this premise—particularly when the alternative is a one-size-fits-all implementation that ignores the very different tax situations of individual clients.
What Advisors Should Be Thinking About Now
Rogerson’s message to advisors wrestling with competition, capacity, and the pace of industry change is direct: “We can help.”
Simple as the message is, the substance behind it is bona fide. The roadmap AssetMark and Adhesion are executing—more sophisticated tax overlays, deeper personalization capabilities, continued investment in service quality—is being shaped by conversations with advisors about exactly where they feel underserved and underpowered.
The advisors who come out ahead over the next decade won’t necessarily be those with the biggest teams or the highest minimums. They’ll be the providers who built the right infrastructure early, found partners who invested alongside them, and carved out time to focus on what clients most deeply value—smart, honest, personalized advice from someone who knows them.
Rogerson is confident AssetMark and Adhesion can be that partner for a growing number of RIAs. Advisors who want to explore what the platform offers can reach him directly at phill.rogerson@assetmark.com.
