Why Billing Is Now a Growth Lever in Wealth & Asset Management
For years, growth in wealth management, asset management, and asset servicing has been framed as a battle for AUM, advisor productivity, and distribution. Those levers still matter. But in 2025, the most underleveraged driver of margin, trust, and enterprise value may be the least glamorous: your billing and revenue operations. If you’re a Head of Wealth, COO, CFO, or Chief Growth Officer, billing can no longer live in operational shadows. How you calculate, explain, and collect fees is now a board-level mandate—one that influences valuation in M&A, regulator posture, advisor retention, and client loyalty. What your invoice is really signalling Every statement you send is a test of operational integrity and value articulation. Clean, transparent bills tell clients “we have our house in order.” Sloppy, opaque, or error-prone bills do the opposite—and buyers see the same signal in diligence. Acquirers scrutinize revenue quality, fee policies, and the auditable trail behind them; weak revenue controls translate directly into price chips or deal risk (see diligence primers from Diligent and Grant Thornton). At the same time, fee compression keeps ratcheting down the price investors will pay, even as they expect more service—documented by Cerulli and long-running research on pricing pressure from BCG. When your pricing power is under pressure, the only way to defend margin is to eliminate leakage, differentiate with transparency, and prove the value inside your fee. The complexity tax is crushing legacy processes The industry remains anchored in fee-based models—more than 70% of advisors today are primarily fee-compensated (Cerulli; PLANADVISER; additional context via Kitces). Firms are also expanding into hybrid models. The most common approaches blend AUM-based pricing with retainers, various flat fees (for financial planning and administration), and subscription services. Minimum relationship fees are also gaining traction, while more niche structures like performance fees add another layer of complexity. Commercially agile? Yes. Operationally brutal for spreadsheets and brittle billing rules? Also yes. Breakpoints, householding, UMA/SMA nuances, negotiated carve-outs—each exception creates new failure points. Regulators know it. The SEC has documented fee-calculation deficiencies across RIAs—e.g., failing to apply tiered breakpoints or using stale asset values—resulting in direct client harm (SEC Risk Alert). Enforcement has accelerated: the SEC announced record action volume in Q1 FY2025 (press release), and FINRA’s disciplinary reports show a parallel story on supervisory gaps that drive inappropriate costs to clients (July 2025; February 2025). Legal analysts are flagging the same trend (Skadden update). The silent P&L bleed: 1–5% revenue leakage “Leakage” sounds minor; it isn’t. Industry write-ups and case analyses consistently peg the unintentional loss of 1–5% of earned revenue each year to misconfigurations, manual workarounds, and data fragmentation (HubiFi). For a $250M fee-revenue franchise, that’s $2.5M–$12.5M of mostly high-margin profit evaporating—before refunds, credits, or reputational damage. The larger your book (or the more complex your fee menu), the bigger the leak. This is why billing belongs in the growth plan, not the “cost center” bucket. Margin defense is growth when it drops to EBITDA. Why this is suddenly a C-suite (and board) problem Three forces have elevated billing from back office to boardroom: The modern billing playbook (that actually moves numbers) Executives are reframing billing as Revenue & Commerce Management—a cross-functional capability spanning finance, operations, compliance, and client experience. Here’s the pattern that wins: Future-proof the revenue engine The next decade will challenge any static billing stack: Your aim isn’t to automate yesterday’s process—it’s to build a nimble revenue chassis that lets you experiment safely with new fee models, integrate with emerging channels, and meet clients where they already are. What the board should see each quarter If billing is truly strategic, it belongs in the KPI pack. Ask for: Tie each metric to risk appetite, EBITDA targets, and client retention goals. That’s how billing earns a permanent place on the board agenda. The growth lever hiding in plain sight When fee compression squeezes the top line and competition for assets is fierce, the most controllable path to durable growth is recapturing what you already earned, preventing avoidable refunds, and turning a potential friction point into a trust amplifier. Modernizing billing isn’t an IT project. It’s a capital-allocation decision with clear line-of-sight to EBITDA, regulatory resilience, M&A valuation, and client lifetime value. Treat it like the strategic growth lever it is. Execution note: If you want a partner purpose-built for the revenue lifecycle in wealth and asset management—billing automation, advisor compensation, analytics, and transparency—PureFacts delivers end-to-end revenue optimization trusted across the industry.