Brett Bernstein has a joke about XML Financial Group’s initials: they stand for “Ex-Merrill Lynch.” It lands because it compresses a business model into three letters. Bernstein and co-founder Rob Kantor did not leave the wirehouse world to invent a faster stock chart or put a robot in a fleece vest. They left because they wanted fewer proprietary products, less institutional conflict and more room to act like owners. Then they learned the less cinematic half of independence: compliance still needs staff, cyber threats still arrive, advisors still retire and clients still expect someone to answer the phone.
The answer became XML, a Bethesda-based wealth and investment management firm with an affiliated broker-dealer, offices in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Colorado, and approximately $4 billion in advisory and brokerage client assets serviced as of the end of 2024. The current company dates to 2016, when XML Financial Group LLC was founded and joined Focus Financial Partners. Its founders’ working relationship goes back to 2004; the broker-dealer’s roots stretch to a four-person Northern Virginia shop founded in 1981.
That layered history matters. XML is neither a fresh fintech startup nor an old brokerage with a new gradient. It is a human-advice business that used a larger partnership to buy scale without advertising itself as a branch of a giant bank. The firm’s closest technology product is a mobile window into a client’s financial picture, articles, webinars and podcasts. The main interface remains a person who knows why the money exists.
The product is a coordinated financial life
XML sells a familiar list with an unusually broad perimeter: financial planning, investment management, retirement planning, estate planning, philanthropic planning, business solutions, and insurance and risk management. A client may arrive with a portfolio question and stay for the knot around it - Social Security timing, a concentrated stock position, a charitable trust, an aging parent, a company succession plan or the tax consequences of all five colliding in the same year.
Its customers include high-net-worth individuals and families, retirees, entrepreneurs, women navigating financial transitions, multigenerational households, trusts, businesses, employer retirement plans and nonprofits. Regulatory data and the company’s marketing totals measure different things: one 2026 Form ADV-based directory puts the advisory practice around $3.3 billion and roughly 2,890 clients, while XML’s broader figure includes both advisory and brokerage assets serviced. The distinction is dull, important and typical of this market.
Revenue is built mostly on recurring fees tied to assets under management, with fixed or hourly planning and consulting work around the edges. Disclosure materials say smaller projects are generally negotiated around $100 to $250 an hour, while portfolio fees vary by program and account size. Brokerage, custody, funds, third-party managers and insurance can bring separate expenses or compensation. This is not a one-price subscription. It is a relationship business whose economics improve when assets stay and grow.
What failed first was the institutional fit
Bernstein’s public telling is blunt. Merrill felt like jail; LPL, where the founders first went independent, felt like a halfway house; becoming an RIA meant taking off the ankle bracelet. The metaphor is spicy, but the underlying objections are ordinary: proprietary products, the possibility of conflict between research and investment banking, and limited entrepreneurial freedom. The founders decided those conditions were incompatible with the kind of advice business they wanted.
“You can partner up, and maybe you can plug into something. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”Brett Bernstein, CEO and co-founder
What changed their minds was not a sudden dislike of scale. It was a better theory of where scale should live. XML would control advice, client experience, hiring and culture. Focus could supply shared experience, deal flow, continuity planning and M&A muscle. Independence became a design choice, not a vow to manufacture every back-office component in Bethesda.
The cost has two columns. Transaction terms for the Collins and Samson combinations were undisclosed. The operating costs are easier to see because Bernstein names them: time, resources, compliance and cybersecurity. Add custody, reporting, billing, recruiting and the work of keeping a service promise consistent across offices. “The grass isn’t always greener,” he cautioned would-be breakaways. Freedom produces a new invoice stack.
Milestones are not a continuous AUM series. The 2024 figure includes advisory and brokerage assets serviced.
Mergers as a succession product
The Collins Investment Group deal shows the mechanism. Collins joined XML in 2021 with more than $1 billion in client assets, bringing the combined total to roughly $3 billion at the time. Collins gained planning and investment resources plus a future succession plan. XML gained clients, leadership and a deeper Washington footprint. The seller’s retirement problem and the buyer’s growth problem became the same transaction.
Samson Wealth Management Group followed in July 2022, adding a Pennsylvania office. XML did something revealing after the paperwork: it waited. Samson operated as a division before adopting the XML name in September 2024. Two years is an eternity to a brand consultant and a reasonable afternoon in a multidecade client relationship. The slow rebrand signaled that integration had to be lived before it could be printed on the door.
Bernstein says culture cannot simply be changed during a merger. That makes cultural diligence more than soft language. If an acquired advisor’s service rhythm, compensation expectations or client promises collide with XML’s, the spreadsheet will not rescue the handoff. The firm’s competitive difference is therefore not a secret portfolio. It is the attempt to combine local-advisor continuity with a consolidator’s resources while leaving enough room for humans to recognize their old practice inside the new one.
Separate independence from isolation. Own the client promise; partner for expensive infrastructure.
Turn succession into a buyer benefit, a seller benefit and a client-retention plan at once.
Delay the rebrand until the operating relationship can support the new name.
Use education - webinars, fraud alerts, practical guides - as an ongoing service layer.
A boutique front door, a platform backstage
XML sits in the crowded middle of American wealth management. On one side are local RIAs whose advantage is intimacy and whose constraint is scale. On the other are national firms such as Creative Planning, CAPTRUST, Mariner and Wealth Enhancement Group, plus private banks with enormous product shelves. Robo-advisers and self-directed brokerages pull price-sensitive clients toward automation. XML’s wager is that affluent households will pay for coordination and judgment, provided the advisor experience does not feel industrial.
Specialization helps. XML Women creates a distinct doorway for women seeking guidance around wealth, wellness and life transitions, without requiring a separate investment factory. Business solutions address owners thinking about leadership continuity, employee retirement plans and the sale of the company. Philanthropic planning speaks to clients for whom giving is not a tax footnote but part of the family identity. The services overlap deliberately because real financial lives refuse to stay in product lanes.
Education is the other differentiator. XML publishes market commentary, retirement explainers, scam alerts and webinars on subjects ranging from Social Security to cybersecurity. In 2025 it brought in Fidelity personal-security specialist Gary Rossi, a former FBI agent, for a fraud program alongside XML’s compliance chief Jennifer Szaro. By August 2026, its feed included retirement catch-up advice, back-to-school scam warnings and a webinar about cash sitting on the sidelines. Content here is not media cosplay. It gives advisors a reason to be useful between annual reviews.
The expertise is visible in the staff list: certified financial planners, chartered financial analysts, a CPA, a lawyer and specialists in divorce, retirement income, insurance and compliance. Awards have followed the expansion. XML appeared on the Financial Times 300 list in 2020, ranked No. 10 among Financial Advisor magazine’s fastest-growing firms in 2022, and made USA Today’s Best Financial Advisory Firms list in both 2023 and 2024. Those badges are not proof that a portfolio will outperform, and the firms behind the rankings say as much. They are better read as evidence that XML has crossed from local practice to recognized regional platform without abandoning the credential-heavy team model its clients buy.
Where the model fits
- Complex, advice-heavy households
- Owners facing succession
- Advisors seeking continuity
- Clients who value a named team
Where it breaks
- Simple, price-first investing
- Mergers with a culture mismatch
- Firms unwilling to fund compliance
- Clients wanting pure self-service
The conditions are the strategy
XML’s playbook will not travel everywhere. It depends on recurring-fee economics, clients with enough complexity to value coordination, acquired advisors willing to share infrastructure and a partner comfortable leaving operating identity intact. It also depends on disciplined compliance. A culture-first merger that overlooks cyber controls or regulatory obligations is merely a pleasant meeting before a bad quarter.
For a founder copying XML, the sequence matters. First, define what the client must experience directly. Second, list the machinery that does not create differentiation. Third, find a partner whose incentives make that machinery better. Finally, make succession part of the product before anyone announces retirement. XML did not abolish the costs of independence; it placed them inside a structure that could carry more than one advisory team.
That is the payoff behind Bernstein’s ankle-bracelet joke. The company’s freedom was never the freedom to work alone. It was the freedom to choose its dependencies - advisors over proprietary products, culture over hurried integration, and a platform partner over back-office heroics. In wealth management, where trust compounds more slowly than assets, choosing what not to build may be the most entrepreneurial decision available.