Facet Wealth CEO says it's 'game on' after a brutal 2024 retrenchment yields blazing 2025 growth, but Facet may have sacrificed its lofty RIA 'category-killer' and 'next-Schwab' dreams in the reset and vendor purge, analysts say

Facet Wealth is again acting more like a unicorn by delivering… well, a Facet-like growth rate, after a series of hard decisions. See: Facet grows '10X,' hits $1 billion in AUM, reaps $100 million C-round, largely from DoorDash backers, and calls itself a 'fintech' company that happens to give advice by CFP

Vendor demotions and a nod upmarket to high-net-worth investors made up the good-news-bad-news scenario, analysts say.

“Facet has accepted it will not be [category-defining, like] Stripe, and is optimizing instead for survivability and unit economics," says Will Trout, director of securities and investments and Datos Insights, in an email exchange.

“It has settled into a competent mid-market position – highly lucrative for insiders, but not reshaping wealth management … It's a sensible move from a management perspective."

The firm's 39-year-old founder and CEO Anders Jones, sees it differently. He says the company has no self-imposed limits.

“We slowed down to speed up … this took a while, frankly, longer than we'd have liked. But it has clearly paid off, and we’re back to growing quickly,” says Jones, in an email exchange.

Goals unchanged

Jones says Facet's sights are still sky high and he takes umbrage that “survivability” is the sole objective outlined by Trout.

"If we were optimizing for survivability and unit economics, we’d look a lot more like a traditional RIA … [with] low growth, high fees, focused on the HNW segment. We’re growing over 55%, focused on a very different market, and at a much lower cost.

“We’re growing at 55% on a $60 million revenue base … [and] our ambition to build the next great financial services company remains unchanged,” he says. 

“The progress over the last year only underscores the huge opportunity that exists, [and] we have a great management team, patient and long-term visionary investors, and an enormous market.” 

Middle of the road

Indeed, it looks like a case of, 'don't let stratospheric objectives be the enemy of realizing rock-solid maturity as an organization,' says Andrew Besheer, principal of Bronxville, N.Y., consultancy Besheer & Associates, in an email exchange.

They are “the types of moves that an organization makes as it shifts to a more mature stage of development and is looking to try to drive additional scale …The type of streamlinings that all self-aware organizations make,” he explains.

Every step Facet has taken, from reducing its headcount, to focusing on custody economics, and emphasizing profitability over breakneck growth is also exactly what a maturing business should do, he adds.

“The 100,000-client thesis is off the table,” but Facet has still become “essential infrastructure for a niche segment," and it will "eventually be acquired by someone at scale … That's a worthy outcome, it's just not disruptive," Trout adds. 

Indeed, the reboot looks great, but Facet may fall short of the transcendent objective of becoming the first RIA startup unicorn to be a category-killing virtual wealth manager based on a subscription fee model, analysts say. 

“Facet's thesis back in 2015-to-2018 – rules-based planning at internet scale for everyone – was genuinely novel,” says Trout.

"What Facet is now is segmentation; [the] mass affluent get software-driven service; HNW clients get humans, plus tax optimization, everyone gets automated commodity work," Trout explains.

Hyper growth

What's beyond dispute is that the Baltimore flat-fee RIA to the masses grew by 56%, or $2.2 billion, to $6 billion overall in the past 12 months – all organic. It serves 16,000 subscription fee-paying clients today.

Facet's far more lucrative high-net-worth (HNW) client count has also soared – up 73%, to 2,228 – and it now accounts for 14% of its total business, up from 8% in 2025.

The total client breakdown is: Core (basic, $2,600 per year), 37%; Plus (mid-tier, $4,300 per year), 38%; and Complete (top-tier, $8,700 per year), 25%.

The company projects 6,500 net new clients and a 40% jump in revenues in 2026. 

Jones, however, has his eyes on a bigger prize.

"Our expectation" is 22,500 clients by year-end 2026, and 60,000 within around four years, he says.

“That said, it’s a 40 million household market that we live in, so while 60,000 households would be a meaningful and exciting $250 million-plus revenue business, it is only scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

It's more akin to the hyper-growth rates that marked Facet's early years, leading Tiburon Strategic Advisors' CEO, Chip Roame in 2022 to call it the “next-Schwab." See: Facet gets a 'next-Schwab' nod and $25 million from (owner) Warburg.

Roame also predicted in 2020 that Facet would reach 100,000 clients by 2025, a date he later revised, postponing it to year-end 2027.

Margin thinking

But one sign that Facet may be on defense is the fact that it has chosen Apex to replace Schwab and Fidelity as its primary RIA custodians, Trout says.

"Dumping Schwab and Fidelity's fee structures for Apex, that's margin thinking, not growth thinking,” he says.

“If Facet had scale and volume, it could have negotiated custodian fees down. Instead, it's outsourcing that problem entirely, dropping Schwab and sidelining Fidelity.”

Apex has a history of being chosen under specific circumstances, Trout says.

"Apex Ascend, is where every platform that has made peace with 'not going to be the infrastructure; [but] the software and service layer' ends up. 

"It's the pragmatic choice, but the fact that Facet is now making this choice, after years of managing custody relationships with scale as the prize, signals a rethink of what it believes it can compete on,” Trout adds.

Customization counts

Jones says Facet chose Apex because it can be readily customized and is more economical.

“We're not really using Schwab anymore, nor are we doing much new business with Fidelity … This isn’t about ‘dropping’ them,'” he explains.

"There was never any discussion of, ‘These guys aren’t doing a good job for us.' We’re consolidating around Apex because of two factors: Our ability to build customer experiences in their tech platform and cost.

At Apex, “we pay a per-account flat fee, versus a basis point fee, which is much more consistent with our model, and in our view much more client friendly … Apex [is] built for fintechs like us … so, it makes sense to rally around one custody partner,” Jones says.

“We’re not focused on the cost of custody but rather the customer experience, and Apex provides an ability to customize that Fidelity and Schwab do not. 

"Yes, Fidelity and Schwab are more expensive … [but] Apex’s platform is by far the most customizable in the market, and that’s why we are consolidating around them,” Jones says.

HNW priority

Facet's pursuit of juiced margins relies on more than a change of custodian, however.

In the last 17 months, it has jacked up fees by an average of 25%, and prioritized the growth of its HNW business.

In 2024, for instance, the average Facet client paid $2,400 a year, a figure that now stands in the “mid” $3,000s, according to Jones. 

Its fees also ranged from $2,000 to $6,000 a year, depending on the level of service required; whereas now they range between $2,600 and $8,700.

“Yes, prices have gone up, but so has value [and] services offered," Jones explains.

We “added a lot to them, [and], in particular, in our highest tier, we include[d] tax filing and estate planning, so for around $8,000, you get essentially a family office in a box,” he adds.

The move – as well as the decision to build an in-house referral unit so that nine out of 10 referrals are generated internally – has led to flat growth for the firm's mass-affluent business – down 0.2%. 

It's also led to a huge increase in the number of more lucrative HNW clients Facet serves. Per-client balances are up, too, with mass-affluent balances up 14.6%, to $191,338, and HNW balances up 3%, to $1.76 million.

“Until 2024 we were very reliant on affiliates, [like] SmartAsset, for our growth … [but] most affiliates are pitching AUM [to] advisors who lead with retirement planning … [and] we’re going after a different – and younger – demographic … [so] we’ve transitioned almost 100% of our spend to our own proprietary digital channels, and our use of affiliates is negligible,” he says.

It's “a much, much more efficient growth engine," he adds.

SmartAsset declined a request for comment.

‘Great leverage’

As with all finance companies in the last several years, Facet has also increasingly relied on artificial intelligence (AI) to keep costs down.

“In the last year ... we’ve been much heavier users of AI within the operations of the business, not just in the delivery of our service, says Jones.

"We’re seeing great leverage here ... we’re on track to grow our customer base by 40% this year, and our net headcount will grow less than 10%. We believe this type of operating efficiency will continue to scale.”

The back-office side has begun to grow again, after several years of churn, where the company opted not to replace staff.

In 2022, Facet employed 300, including roughly 100 Certified Financial Planners (CFPs). By late 2024, it employed 157, including 65 CFPs, a headcount reduction of 48%, and 35%, respectively. Today, it employs 200 – up 27% – including 60 CFPs – down 8%.

It still retains a high-advisor-to-client ratio, however; running at an average rate of one advisor to every 267 clients, up from one-to-222, seventeen months ago – putting it somewhere between the RIA model, and the 1:500 ratio common in call-centers, according to Trout.

4,300 per year“It's defensible only if AI is genuinely absorbing advisor work like tax filing, document drafting, compliance rather than just forcing advisors to work harder,” he says.

“Automation” is falling the gap, Jones says.

Aspiration over reason?

In 2020, Facet grew its client count by 300%, but that proved a shortly-lived zenith. 

The company's growth then fell consecutively, year-over-year, from 66% (2021), through 20% (2022), 16% (2023), to 4.5% (2024), before it finally picked up last year, hitting 10.3% – a figure Jones expects will climb to 40% by year-end 2026.

Yet Facet is risking repeating one of the mistakes that led to its reset, according to Besheer. See: Facet Wealth is doubling in size every six months with subscription model, on-the-job training, no central offices and a rising belief it can be the 'next Fidelity'.

It has a tendency to overestimate future growth, he explains.

It's “a really big ask; and to get there they’d need to be both growing net new investor clients – and I can see them doing that successfully to an extent in the GenZ prospect pool – [and] win away clients from existing [firms] to gain access to the larger accounts that require [Facet's higher-end] ‘complete’ subscription tier," Besheer continues.

“I honestly don’t see how, barring inorganic growth, they can make a U-Turn from where they were, to where they are, to 40% year-over-year growth again,” he adds.

It “would require a step-function change the company has never demonstrated,” Trout agrees.

“The only plausible mechanism is if weaning off SmartAsset actually unlocks organic direct customer acquisition at scale. Facet has never shown it can acquire customers that way," he says.

“The forecast is aspiration,” he adds.

Signaling a rethink

Jones rejects the argument that Facet is settling into mediocrity.

Trout is correct to say the custody shift was “about reducing cost drag and simplifying the tech stack,” but his “point about infrastructure is misplaced. We have never tried to be infrastructure," Jones says.

Besheer also counsels that Jones deserves credit for ensuring his firm both made and continues to make the right moves to assure its future, even if it is likely to be a little less stellar than the “next-Schwab.”