Where will you be working in five years? Before you answer, consider this: Have you noticed your inbox littered with webinar invitations to learn more, compare platforms and consider a move to independence?

If you've been tempted, you're not alone. Wirehouse reps who switched firms have begun to show an increasing willingness to jettison the wirehouse model altogether in favor of independence. Financial magazines have even coined a phrase to refer to these analysts—the breakaway brokers—and it represents the fifth of seven trends facing the industry. In the last four months, I've written about the backlash against the wealthy; the fragility of advisor-client trust; the rising costs of investment and the looming tax burden. The reasons behind this fifth trend are worth examining.

Chip Roame is among those who saw the early signs of this shift. The managing principal of Tiburon Strategic Advisors, a consulting firm that produces strategy and marketing-research studies for the industry, Roame was predicting in early 2009 that wirehouses would see unprecedented losses as the dust settled and advisors made their moves. The prediction, he says, was based on interviews Tiburon conducted at the time with financial advisors, who were clearly disgruntled.

The wirehouse brands have broken down, Roame says, and financial advisors no longer view their firms as stable places to work. It certainly hasn't helped that some advisors have had to defend to their clients the actions of their own firms' investment-banking groups and trading desks.

"The wirehouse model has not evolved quickly enough to satisfy the needs of financial advisors," Roame says. "Financial advisors are radically different than they were a decade or two ago.... Back in the early days, [they] were salespeople and not advisors. They were generally focused on stocks, and they were mostly young. As they've grown older, they care about the value of the business they created, and they have moved to more fee business."

Wirehouses once commanded competitive advantage by offering financial advisors special access to managers that might otherwise be closed to individual investors. Access is less of a factor today, since it's no longer just the province of wirehouses. Roame point out that Schwab, Fidelity and Ameritrade can connect with the same managers that were once exclusively the domain of the wirehouses.

And then there are the brands. Sterling brands, many with proud histories, became liabilities in 2008, and grew increasingly unattractive after 2009's headlines about further wirehouse problems.

What if anything could stem the flow toward independence? Roame says the wirehouses could build desirable open platforms where advisors could work with the firms in any capacity they want. The wirehouses, he adds, could then clarify the advisors' right to own and sell their books of business.

Succession planning is a big issue and sunset programs are not equivalent to selling one's practice on the open market.

For those wirehouse advisors who decide to make the leap, Roame also has some advice about the platform or methodologies to deploy in choosing a custodian or broker-dealer. Decide first whether you need an independent broker-dealer. Perhaps you need to keep your license to receive commissions and trailers. If not, custodians may be a potential alternative.

Only then should you compare the key features: product availability, price, technology, business support and culture.

And you may find some solace in the knowledge that you won't be the only one on that path to independence. Industry consultants are predicting growth to continue for custodians and independent broker-dealers in the years ahead.

Gerri Leder is an industry marketing consultant and can be reached at leder@ledermark.com.