For years, the relationship between CPAs and financial advisors was often built around referrals.
For many years, the relationship between CPAs and financial advisors was largely built around referrals. A client needed investment advice, so the CPA introduced an advisor. A client needed tax help, so the advisor introduced an accountant. The two professionals might speak when needed, particularly around year-end planning or a major transaction, but the work itself often remained separate.
That model is now changing.
Across the US advisory market, CPAs and financial advisors are moving closer together because clients increasingly need advice that is coordinated across tax, investments, retirement, estate planning, business succession and family wealth. These are no longer separate conversations. For affluent families, business owners and retirees, they are different parts of the same financial picture, and decisions made in one area can quickly create consequences in another.
The firms that understand this are beginning to build models that reflect how clients actually experience their financial lives.
Integrated Partners is one of the clearest examples. Its Integrated CPA Alliance was created to bring CPAs and financial advisors into a more collaborative model, with the aim of helping both professions serve clients more effectively. In November 2025, the firm announced that the alliance had reached its 250th CPA partnership. At the same time, Integrated Partners said the national RIA served more than $23 billion in assets under advisement.
Those figures suggest that the CPA-advisor relationship is no longer simply a useful referral channel. For some firms, it is becoming a central part of their growth strategy, client proposition and long-term market positioning.
Integrated Partners has described the CPA Alliance as a model that connects CPAs and financial advisors in a way that helps advisors gain high-quality client referrals while enabling CPAs to expand services, deepen client relationships and create new revenue through integrated wealth management. Paul Saganey, founder and CEO of Integrated Partners, described the 250-partner milestone as evidence of the trust the firm had built with CPAs across the country, adding that Integrated was already focused on building towards the next 250.
The performance data behind the model is also striking. Integrated Partners said advisors using the CPA Alliance saw an average 20.3% increase in trailing 12-month revenue, ahead of an industry benchmark of 17.6%. For an advisory market that is increasingly focused on organic growth, referral quality and deeper client relationships, that is a meaningful figure.
The attraction is not difficult to understand. The CPA is often one of the client’s most trusted professional relationships. They see the tax return, understand the business structure, know when income patterns change and are often aware of major financial events before anyone else. A client selling a business, receiving an inheritance, taking capital gains, making charitable gifts or preparing for retirement will usually have a tax conversation before they make a wider wealth planning decision.
The financial advisor, meanwhile, is responsible for turning those facts into a forward-looking strategy. Portfolio design, retirement income, estate coordination, liquidity, risk management and long-term planning all depend on an accurate understanding of the client’s tax position. When the advisor does not have that context, or when the CPA is not involved in the planning conversation early enough, opportunities can easily be missed.
That is the weakness of a disconnected model. The client becomes the messenger between professionals who are each looking at an important but incomplete part of the picture. Assumptions can become inconsistent. Tax decisions may not line up with portfolio decisions. Estate and charitable strategies may be discussed too late. Business owners may receive technically sound advice in one area that does not fully account for the broader implications across their wealth, family and company.
The integrated model tries to solve that problem by creating a more joined-up experience.
This does not have to mean a full merger between an RIA and a CPA firm. The market is developing a range of structures, including formal partnerships, alliance models, shared planning processes, referral agreements, co-branded client experiences, revenue-sharing arrangements and firms that decide to bring tax planning or tax preparation in-house. The right model will depend on the size of the firm, the client base, the operational capability and the appetite for complexity.
Capital Group recently explored this same trend in an article on RIAs adding tax preparation to their client proposition. The article highlighted Modern Wealth Management, Cornerstone Wealth Group and RGB Financial as examples of firms using tax services to support growth, client experience and next-generation relationships. It also reported that only 15% of RIAs with more than $1 billion in assets had created an in-house accounting business, despite growing interest in tax services across the market.
That gap is important. It suggests that while many firms understand the strategic value of tax-aware advice, relatively few have yet built the infrastructure to deliver it directly.
Modern Wealth Management is one of the more developed examples cited by Capital Group. The firm had grown to $11 billion in assets under management in just over two years, had built a 30-person tax team and filed 2,200 returns during the 2025 tax season. Jason Gordo, President and Cofounder of Modern Wealth Management, told Capital Group that adding tax services had driven both client growth and satisfaction.
Capital Group also pointed to a broader talent issue in the accounting profession, reporting that around 300,000 CPAs had left the profession in recent years. That matters for wealth management because clients still need tax-aware planning, even as traditional accounting capacity comes under pressure. If CPAs are harder to access, and if clients expect more coordinated advice, advisory firms will need to think carefully about how they connect tax expertise with wealth planning.
At the same time, bringing tax preparation in-house is not a simple decision. Capital Group was clear that tax preparation can be expensive, operationally demanding and culturally challenging. It can also be financially marginal if firms underestimate the staffing, systems, compliance and workflow requirements involved. For many RIAs, the answer may not be to build a tax department from scratch, but to create stronger partnerships with CPA firms that already have the expertise and client trust.
That is where alliance models become particularly interesting.
Mariner’s CPA Alliance makes the same point from a different angle. The firm says it believes in integrating tax and wealth management advice as part of a customized wealth plan for clients. It also positions CPA partnerships as a way for accounting firms to gain a competitive advantage as traditional CPA services and wealth management services continue to move closer together.
The common thread across these examples is that the market is moving beyond simple introductions. The opportunity is not just for advisors to win referrals from accountants, or for CPAs to find somewhere to send clients who need investment advice. The larger opportunity is to create a more complete advisory experience around the client.
That distinction matters.
Clients do not experience their financial lives in professional silos. They experience one life, one business, one family, one tax position, one retirement plan and one set of consequences. When their professional advisors are not connected, the client is often left to coordinate the complexity themselves. When those professionals work together, the client can receive advice that is more coherent, more timely and more useful.
For advisors, the CPA relationship can create a higher-trust path to new clients and a much deeper understanding of each client’s financial reality. For CPAs, the right advisory relationship can expand the firm’s value to clients without requiring every accounting firm to build a full wealth management business from scratch. For clients, it can create a better experience at exactly the moments when financial decisions matter most.
The future of advice will not be defined only by bigger RIAs, better technology or more sophisticated portfolios. Those things matter, but they are only part of the story. The deeper shift is towards advice that connects the different parts of a client’s financial life and helps them make better decisions across tax, wealth, family and business.
That is where CPAs and financial advisors meet.
And it is why the relationship between the two professions is becoming one of the most important growth stories in the advisory market.
Sources and further reading
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