President Joe Skarda says its wealth management arm is attracting recruits with an entrepreneurial, RIA-like environment that avoids “bureaucratic red tape” of larger platforms.
Key Wealth, the wealth management unit of Cleveland-based KeyBank, added 53 net advisors in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to its latest earnings report. Advisor headcount jumped 10% for the quarter to 543 total advisors, with parent company KeyCorp reporting a 14% year-over-year increase to $70 billion in assets under management.
“We’re winning the war for talent—our advisors have a very successful track record, and we’re up 10% on headcount in a fiercely competitive environment,” said Key Wealth president Joe Skarda. “We’re finding a lot of talent in wirehouses. Out of the independent channel and RIAs, we’ve had some success recruiting out of there [and] we’ve had mild success hiring out of other banks.”
Skarda adds that Key Wealth hired around 100 advisors last quarter, with a turnover rate around 10% prompting the 53 net added advisors. He says about 60% of the advisor headcount growth stems from external recruiting with the other 40% coming from Key’s internal associate training programs to promote staff into private client advisor and relationship manager roles.
“What we’ve tried to do is maintain that entrepreneurial spirit that you can create through an RIA-type environment,” said Skarda. “We’re not massive—we’re big enough to matter and we’re big enough to have the investment sophistication we need on our platform. However, we’re not so big that we tie our people up in bureaucratic red tape and other things that make it hard to serve clients.”
Key Wealth announced in May 2025 that it was expanding its partnership with financial planning software Envestnet, which Skarda expects to be rolled out to Key’s broker-dealer and RIA business in the third quarter of this year, followed by early 2027 deployment for Key’s private banking business.
“We are in the process now of looking at the technology that enables our alternative investment platform—the subscription process, K1s, performance reporting, all that stuff. I think over the next call it three to six months, you’ll see us make some announcements on some third party tech providers that are going to better enable our private investment platform,” said Skarda.
Key Private Client, the mass affluent channel under Key Wealth, now manages $6.9 billion across 54,000 clients. That unit launched in 2023 to serve clients with $250,000 to $2 million in assets with services across deposits, lending, investments, and alternatives.
“In the private banking business, we feel great about our comp program in that they have a salary, they have an incentive structure, and they are eligible for a bonus which has some stock components at times,” said Skarda. “Our desire is that the top end of our RM [relationship manager] channel in the private bank are some of the highest paid in the industry, and we feel we’re able to achieve that.”
Key Wealth’s RIA business manages $8 billion in assets and reached $1.8 billion in net flows of client assets in 2025, a significant raise from its $100 million net flow in 2020, according to Skarda. Now at $70 billion AUM, KeyBank aims to grow its entire wealth management business to $100 billion in assets by 2030. KeyBank has about 1,000 branch locations across 15 U.S. states.
“You will see us continue to recruit aggressively in our RIA business. We will still recruit in our private banking business, probably to a lesser degree in 2026 and beyond than we did in 2025 and prior,” said Skarda. “But you’ll see us continue in the RIA space with pretty aggressive recruiting targets and tactics going forward.”
