For years, foreign wealth managers and investment advisors serving U.S. clients could fly under the radar (as could their clients’ assets) of U.S. regulators. According to a recent report from the market research firm Aite Group, that’s fixing to change, if it hasn’t already, as a result of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s get-tough policy on hidden U.S. private-client assets and the cross-border regulation of non-U.S. advisors.

It all started in 2008 when the SEC charged Swiss-based UBS with helping U.S. taxpayers hide money from the Internal Revenue Service, and it said UBS violated U.S. law by acting as an unregistered broker-dealer and investment advisor in its cross-border dealings with U.S. citizens. Rather than put up a long, drawn-out fight, UBS agreed to a settlement costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Furthermore, the Dodd-Frank Act cast a wider net to reel in foreign investment advisors by ditching a rule stipulating that foreign advisors who had less than 15 U.S. clients during the prior 12 months––and who didn’t market themselves in the U.S. as an investment advisor––weren’t required to register with the SEC under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. In its place, Dodd-Frank tightened the eligibility requirements for such exemptions for non-U.S. advisors, which subsequently helped boost the number of foreign advisors registered with the SEC.

Aite Group’s analysis of SEC registrations taken from the Form ADV data available at March 2013 found there were 661 foreign RIAs among the total number of 10,602 RIAs, or 6% of the total market. The top four countries represented were the U.K. (225), Canada (98), Hong Kong (52) and Switzerland (51). Twenty countries have four or more RIAs, a group that comprises 90% of all foreign RIAs.

But most of those were fund managers or others geared toward institutional investors, and only 20% of foreign RIAs were wealth managers dealing with private clients. Among those, Canada led the way with 50 registered wealth managers, followed by Switzerland (34) and the U.K. (16). No other country comes close to double digits, according to the Aite report, SEC-Registered Foreign Investment Advisors: Will the Wealth Managers Please Stand Up?

As seen with Switzerland and UBS, the SEC’s bark has had some bite. Whereas formerly upwards of 14,000 U.S. citizens had parked billions of dollars of assets with non-U.S. UBS advisors in Switzerland through 2008, the costs and headaches of serving U.S. clients today has created a situation where “the majority of Swiss wealth managers that once happily served U.S. taxpayers as clients have beat a swift retreat, pulling back from serving any form of U.S. taxpayer, whether resident, nonresident, declared or undeclared,” says the report.

Meanwhile, Swiss advisors wanting to keep their U.S. clients have complied with the new regulations, and the 34 Swiss wealth managers registered with the SEC in March 2013 was up more than eightfold from the four registered in 2007.

So far, only Canada, Switzerland and the U.K. have much of a presence among foreign wealth management RIAs. But as Aite notes, it’s only a matter of time before increased U.S. vigilance in tracking down untaxed U.S. assets managed overseas results in more SEC-registered foreign wealth managers––particularly from wealth centers such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai.