When Howe & Rusling Wealth Management registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisory firm almost 85 years ago, the founders were early adopters in a field called investment counseling. Today, the Rochester, New York-based RIA is technically the oldest company in the country focused on retail wealth management clients, in terms of its date of registration with the SEC and continuing standalone, independent status. Founders Winthrop “Wint” Howe and Lee Rusling registered with federal regulators under the recently passed Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act because they believed in the “importance of being a fiduciary and putting clients’ interests above their own,” said Craig Cairns, the company’s president and majority owner. They wanted “to validate that by registering,” he said of the RIA’s founders, who were also among the first class of chartered financial analysts in 1963. At the time those two bills passed unanimously and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed them into law in 1940, they covered 436 companies with $2 billion in assets across 300, 000 accounts. Now, there are 15, 870 RIAs with $144. 6 trillion in assets, 1 million employees and 68. 4 million clients. What would Howe and Rusling think? “I think they’d be very proud of the fact that they were one of the earliest and wonder what took everyone else so long,” Cairns said. READ MORE: Should financial advisors be dually registered or RIA-only? The legal roots of the RIA movement With the first SEC registrations becoming effective 85 years ago this month, the combination of fiduciary duty and the technology enabling businesses to offer investment advice at a mass scale has turned RIAs into a huge, growing industry. But the debate over whether the full spirit of those laws has been put into practice remains a tense and evolving fight. And the question of how to abide with the existing and future guidelines under laws requiring RIAs and their financial advisors to put clients’ best interests first in their advice will determine the next phase of development in the financial planning profession and the wealth management industry. “No one picks their RIA because they’ve got extra fiduciary liability if they do something bad,” said Michael Kitces, the longtime planner, writer and entrepreneur from Kitces. com, AdvicePay, the XY Planning Network and Focus Partners Wealth. “You pick your advisor because you think they’re going to do something good and work with you effectively in the first place. To me, the growth of the RIA model has very little to do directly with the fiduciary obligation, per se, and it’s simply, ‘Look, there’s one model where you work with people to sell them stuff, and there’s one model where you work with people to give them helpful advice,’ and it turns out consumers like helpful advice more than being sold stuff.” To Kitces, the tipping point came in the ’90s with the rise of personal computers, digital brokerages and custodial tech systems that gave RIAs the backend programs to manage a wider base of clients. And many of the companies that appear on a list of the 25 longest -enured RIAs based on their continual Central Registration Depository numbers in the annual Investment Adviser Association and COMPLY snapshot report have expanded into household names that are vast conglomerates tied into those capabilities. They include RIA arms of T. Rowe Price, William Blair, Oppenheimer & Company, Invesco, Dodge & Cox, Edward Jones, Citi and JPMorgan Chase. Five asset management and institutional client-focused firms Barings, Beck Mack & Oliver, DWS Investment Management Americas, Everett Harris & Company and St. Denis J. Villere hold the distinction of having registered on the first possible day, Nov. 1, 1940, and maintaining the same RIA status up to the present. However, the distinction between financial planning, retail wealth management, employer retirement plans and asset management, as well as the young age of the current record ranks of RIAs, displays the scope of the two foundational laws and part of the reason why fiduciary rules spark so much debate. As of the halfway point of 2025, the registrations of only 124 RIAs were more than 50 years old, those of 89 went back further than 75 years and just around half of the registered firms had effective dates that came before 2018. READ MORE: What’s wrong with the big RIA model, straight from advisors’ mouths Coming to terms with the debate That means today’s RIAs could further define the fiduciary principles codified into law 85 years ago. But to do that, they’ll need to draw boundary lines and find political consensus which hasn’t occurred with two Labor Department fiduciary rules that fell to industry lawsuits. At the same time, other recent developments have applied the fiduciary duty to more types of investment advice. A 2007 court ruling in favor of the Financial Planning Association struck down the “Merrill Lynch rule” that exempted some advisory fee-based advice from the fiduciary duty under the Advisers Act, and the CFP Board’s 2019 amendments to its codes required certified financial planners to abide by the standard in all their advice, noted Elissa Buie and Dave Yeske, the founders of San Francisco and Vienna, Virgnia-based RIA firm Yeske Buie. Like many planners, though, they see ample room for more uniform fiduciary rules with tougher consumer protections. They don’t approve of “this idea that you could be a fiduciary one minute and take your hat off and be a stockbroker or an insurance salesman the next minute,” Yeske said. The SEC’s Regulation Best Interest which replaced the prior “suitability” standard in 2020 governs brokerages, while insurance sales come under a variety of state and federal rules. Both regulatory structures enforce standards that are, to a murky extent, less stringent than the fiduciary duty enshrined into the ’40 Act and the Advisers Act, even though they affect some RIAs that are operating under those laws in most areas of their business these days. Those laws have such “enduring importance” because they introduced the “concept of a fiduciary standard or a fiduciary obligation,” Yeske said. As much as critics like them recognize that “the profession of financial planning came about with the ability to be dual-licensed” with a brokerage and an RIA, Buie said that those increasingly blurry lines between the two types of registration and some potential loopholes in the rules reflect the need for guidelines that apply across the board. For instance, she cited her mixed feelings about the fact that there are rapidly expanding ranks of CFPs working with more clients seeking advice under the toughest standards. The idea that “some of these firms are maybe finding a way to skirt” them concerns some planners, Buie said, suggesting that a CFP could provide advice under the fiduciary duty and then stand down as salespeople or other staff members step in to work with the client under a lesser standard. Of course, that possibility only took shape because the CFP Board adopted its fiduciary standard in the first place, Buie pointed out. “Eventually, the rule should be, the entire firm has to be fiduciary in order for us to be fiduciary,” she said. “It freed us up to move to, in my opinion, the next dialogue, which is the difference between financial advice and financial planning.” READ MORE: Here’s a financial advisor’s estimated value to clients An RIA stalwart with a proud history The contrast between providing investment advice and the dynamic process of planning would not likely have occurred to the lawmakers when they passed the two laws and others in response to the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression. With its SEC registration date of Jan. 3, 1941, Howe & Rusling came after the handful of firms that received approval a few months earlier. Those earlier firms focus primarily on fund management or employer retirement plans rather than retail wealth services, though. And, unlike the five firms that had officially registered by November 1940, Howe & Rusling offers financial planning, according to their Form ADV disclosures. Its founders had a “passion” to work with individual clients from the earliest days of the firm, which traces its history as far back as the launch of Howe’s predecessor investment counseling firm in 1930 and his partnership with Rusling a decade later, Cairns noted. In a 1975 interview with the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Howe said he decided to start an investment counseling business shortly after reading an article in the Harvard Business Review that described it as “the coming profession.” As a blind person who had successfully navigated earning a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Business Administration, Howe persisted through some difficult times in the nascent field. “When I think of those horrible Depression years, how I survived I wouldn’t know,” he told the newspaper. “I wouldn’t do it to a dog.” Rusling’s son Tom would later buy the business from his father before it sold to a couple of other owners and, in 2006, to a group of employees led by Cairns, who started at the RIA six years earlier. Last year, the firm’s assets under management passed $2 billion seven years after topping $1 billion. It now has 24 employees, including eight CFPs and zero brokers, and offices in Syracuse, New York City, Boise, Idaho, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. With five other employees who have ownership stakes in the firm, Cairns gets “emails and calls every day to change that, but we are determined to stay independent,” he said. “We’re not so large that we don’t think of each and every client, and we’re determined to stay that way,” Cairns said. “If you serve them well and take care of them and really understand their objectives, you end up with multigenerational clients of which we have several who have been with us a very long time. We’re really leaning into the fact that we are independent, and we’re also leaning into the fact that we believe strongly in a human connection.” READ MORE: When should a financial advisor launch an RIA? The New Deal laws that created the modern industry Decades ago, humans from many professional spheres and both major political parties came together in support of the ’40 Act and the Adviser Act. The bills emerged “after very painstaking and careful study, in which really almost a miracle occurred . an agreement which is embodied in this bill was reached between those engaged in the industry and the members of the SEC,” former Massachusetts Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge later recalled, then-SEC Chair Mary Jo White noted in her 2015 speech on the 75th anniversary of the law. Investment firms at the time “had a common interest in ridding the industry of wrongdoers who had tarnished the reputation of the entire industry,” White said. “Over the years, enforcement has made good use of the fiduciary duty owed by advisers to their clients to bring cases to address a wide range of problematic practices of investment advisers, including not adequately disclosing conflicts of interest related to compensation, expenses and loans to affiliates, distributing misleading advertisements and misleading advisory clients about investments in affiliated entities.” Even at the time he signed them into law in August 1940, though, President Roosevelt and other supporters drew a direct line to the cooperation between an industry and its regulators and, more specifically, an SEC study ordered by the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. Other legislation that laid the guardrails of today’s investment and finance industries included the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act the following year, the 1938 amendments to the Bankruptcy Act and the Trust Indenture Act of 1939. “There is no necessity of reviewing in detail the many unhealthy practices which this legislation is designed to eliminate,” Roosevelt said upon signing the bills into law. “It is enough to point out that the investment trusts have themselves actively urged that an agency of the federal government assume immediate supervision of their activities. This attitude on the part of the investment trust industry and investment advisers is most commendable.” The SEC’s power to enforce the fiduciary duty secured its most significant validation at the Supreme Court 23 years later, when seven justices sided with regulators in the SEC vs. Capital Gains Research Bureau case. “The high standards of business morality exacted by our laws regulating the securities industry do not permit an investment adviser to trade on the market effect of his own recommendations without fully and fairly revealing his personal interests in these recommendations to his clients,” Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote in the majority opinion. “Experience has shown that disclosure in such situations, while not onerous to the adviser, is needed to preserve the climate of fair dealing which is so essential to maintain public confidence in the securities industry and to preserve the economic health of the country.” That decision clarified that the “antifraud, antimisrepresentation provisions in the Advisors Act amount to a fiduciary obligation,” Kitces noted. Nevertheless, the few RIAs catering to primarily high net worth individual clients remained “a fairly, sort of, quiet niche side of the industry for a long time,” Kitces said. They didn’t gain a recognizable footprint until after the opening of Charles Schwab’s Schwab Advisor Services in 1993 and similar custodians launched by Fidelity Investments and Ameritrade. “They began to offer a back-end custodial platform for registered investment advisors to have a more scalable system to both trade and to bill, because those are the two core functions you need to be able to execute at scale,” Kitces said. “The moment that technology emerged that made it scalable to manage portfolios and scalable to collect fees so you can actually get paid for this work, the RIA model took off. And so, to me, that’s really where you see the hockey stick of growth in the RIA channel.” READ MORE: Record-breaking RIA growth, in 5 charts Ancient but still-evolving laws The addition of the scalable technology to the earlier establishment of the fiduciary duty has led to the vastly successful industry of RIAs that dominate wealth management today. But the principles behind the 1940 laws and, especially, their application to those “regulating financial advisory services and financial brokerage services” still provoke disagreements and calls for reform, Boston University School of Law Professor of Law Emerita Tamar Frankel wrote in her 2018 essay, “The Rise of Fiduciary Law.” In it, she identified investment advice laws as an area in which “fiduciary laws seem to encroach” on other principles such as implied contracts and freedom from non-specific regulation. She also cited a column by Kitces that year on how clients may undermine the fiduciary duty by dividing their assets between several different advisors and using all of their recommendations at once. Another problem could emerge with trying to define whether it is in a client’s best interest when “someone gives me advice but is paid by someone who has different or conflicting interests for that advice,” Frankel wrote. Anyone’s answer would be “as good as mine, but both of us are clearly and unequivocally guessing and perhaps confused,” she wrote. So, despite the roots of fiduciary laws dating to Roman and British law, the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and Asian and European legal systems, the exact terms of those rules represent a tough but important debate that’s playing out today. “Regardless of whether they are enforced by law, by social rules, or by cultural pressures, fiduciary rules are a condition to the long-term well-being of a human society,” Frankel wrote. “A society will be wealthiest if those who act as fiduciaries, self-enforce and follow fiduciary law principles. The reverse is also likely to be true. A society whose fiduciaries do not feel compelled to be trustworthy, will, in the long run, be the poorest.”.
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