Managed Account Assets Reached $13.7T in 2024

Managed account assets grew 19.8% to reach $13.7 trillion in assets in 2024, growing at a similar rate to a 19.6% increase in 2023, Cerulli Associates found in its update, “The Cerulli Report – U.S. Managed Accounts 2025: Tax Optimization.”

The accounts, which provide participants personalized retirement advice, have grown in popularity in recent years. The ability to work with an adviser to help individuals with decisions on when they should retire or how they should optimize their plans for claiming Social Security is also seen as a benefit. In 2024, Callan found that managed accounts gained market share from prior years.

According to Cerulli, strong domestic equity growth during 2024 propelled managed accounts forward, increasing assets by more than $2 trillion. In addition to investment-driven growth, unified managed account programs experienced the highest net flows, at $257.7 billion, followed by separate managed account programs, at $218.4 billion. Total net flows into managed account programs reached $811.8 billion, the second-highest point ever.

The report showed that UMA and SMA programs also exhibited the highest five-year compound annual growth rates, at rates of 18.7% and 18.3%, respectively.

“With three-, five-, and 10-year growth rates well in excess of those posted by rep-as-portfolio-manager programs, which currently reign as the largest platform type at $3.4 trillion, UMAs ($3.2 trillion) could snatch the title over the course of 2025,” said Scott Smith, a senior director at Cerulli, in a statement. “Though UMA programs still account for less than one-quarter of overall managed account assets, this change will symbolize a passing of the torch to the next generation of platforms featuring vehicle and discretion flexibility.”

The firm reported it expects managed account assets to grow at an annualized rate of 12.3% over the next four years, reaching $31.8 trillion by 2028.

The adviser firms that sponsor managed accounts continue to consolidate their separate platforms into a unified offering as the demands for personalized portfolios and tax optimization increase. According to the report, Cerulli analysts expect both UMAs and SMAs to continue to experience strong growth. Still, more than 20% of platform sponsors indicated that their firm intends to run several separate programs for the “foreseeable future.”

“Though platform consolidation is inherently a complex and costly proposition, platform sponsors that have not agreed on a long-term strategy are delaying the inevitable,” said Smith in a statement.

Cerulli also found wealth managers’ most reliable source of relative “portfolio alpha”— performance relative to the broad market—to be tax optimization of clients’ investments. Of platform sponsors surveyed, 82% identified “improving tax management capabilities” as a top development priority for their platforms, and 76% of investors surveyed and deemed “affluent” considered it important for their provider to make their finances less complicated.

Lastly, the report noted that while asset managers want to maintain their SMA trading responsibilities, managed account sponsors are looking to bring more model-delivered investment portfolios to their UMA platforms. Introducing manager-traded SMAs can add complexity by forcing the asset manager and overlay manager to coordinate trading and tax optimization across the portfolio, Cerulli found. Meanwhile, the largest asset classes—direct indexing, municipal fixed income and taxable fixed income—continue to be predominantly manager-traded—at 98%, 100% and 95%, respectively.

Data for “The Cerulli Report— U.S. Managed Accounts 2025: Prioritizing Tax Optimization” derive from Cerulli’s proprietary database, with most data points coming from a survey fielded in the fourth quarter of 2024. The managed account survey effort tracks data from the early 1990s to the present. Cerulli maintains a survey engine that reaches out each quarter to more than 40 managed account program sponsors and more than 70 asset managers offering separate accounts on brokerage consultant programs. The sponsors and managers surveyed represent more than 90% of fee-based managed account assets nationwide.