Ameriprise Financial, Inc.

Ameriprise Financial, Inc. is an American financial-services company that provides financial advice, brokerage, banking, asset management, and annuity and insurance products, generating $18.5 billion of net revenue and $3.56 billion of net income in fiscal 2025. It oversees roughly $1.69 trillion of client assets under management and administration through three operating businesses — Advice & Wealth Management, Asset Management (operating globally as Columbia Threadneedle Investments), and Retirement & Protection Solutions — served by a network of about 10,000 financial advisors and roughly 13,600 employees.

This is the story of a company that has quietly become one of the best-performing financial stocks in America by doing something unglamorous extraordinarily well: gathering retail client assets, charging a recurring fee to advise on them, and returning almost all of the resulting cash to shareholders. Since its 2005 spin-off from American Express, Ameriprise has delivered the top total shareholder return in the S&P 500 Financials index, and it now earns an adjusted operating return on equity north of 50% — a figure that looks more like a branded software franchise than a financial institution.

The transformation from a capital-heavy insurer into a capital-light advice business is, by 2026, essentially complete. The file turns on a single question: whether the wealth-management engine can keep compounding client assets fast enough to outrun three slow headwinds — a fading tailwind from higher interest rates, persistent outflows at the asset-management arm, and a long tail of legacy life and long-term-care liabilities that still sits on the balance sheet.