Stifel Financial Corp.’s wealth management unit finished the year with record net revenues and pre-tax operating income, the company said Tuesday.

The retail business generated $474 million in net revenue during the fourth quarter, up 16 percent from a year ago, and for the full year the unit produced revenue of $1.8 billion, up 17 percent from 2016.

Client assets of $272.6 billion also set a new record, growing 15 percent from a year earlier.

Growth in bank-sweep balances and asset-management revenue drove results, CEO Ron Kruszewski told analysts on a conference call.

The firm continued to see a shift to fee-based assets, which hit a record $88 billion at year's end, up 25 percent for the year.

Advisor numbers were down slightly, by 1.6 percent, to 2,244 at year-end.

Stifel slowed its recruiting efforts in anticipation of the DOL rule, Kruszewski said, but the firm has “ramped that back up. I think that our recruiting pipeline is healthy.”

“Good markets tend to be a negative to recruiting, too,” he said. “People are very busy in good markets and that tends to have a dampening effect.”

Firms pulling out of the broker recruiting protocol will also impact industry recruiting and spark some increased litigation, he added.

“I personally am dismayed that the large firms have pulled out” of the protocol, Kruszewski told analysts. “I understand what they’re doing, but I think the industry will react because we can’t get in a situation where we’re limiting client choice. ... I think in the in the end the industry is going to deal with this.”

Stifel favors acquisitions over recruiting individual advisors, Kruszewski said.

Last October, it announced a deal to acquire Chicago-based Ziegler & Company’s wealth management business, with 57 advisors and $4.8 billion in client assets. A year ago, Stifel completed the acquisition of City Securities Corp., with 40 private client advisors in eight offices in Indiana and $4 billion in assets. And in 2015, Stifel bought the U.S. business of Barclays’ Wealth and Investment Management, which at the time had about 180 financial advisors with $56 billion in client assets.

Last year, Stifel got out of the independent contractor business, selling the independent brokerage it picked up from a 2015 acquisition of Sterne Agee.

Kruszewski said he anticipates that the SEC will come up with a fiduciary standard that is more workable than what the DOL proposed.

“I think the SEC recognizes that the pay-as-you go [model] versus a straight fee benefits clients in certain situations [and that] you shouldn’t favor one business model over the other,” he said.

And with the new tax law ending the deductibility of advisory fees, “that certainly should factor into what’s in the best interests of clients,” he said.

The tax changes may also spur more corporate financing business, Kruszewski said. “We see a lot of discussion [by corporate clients] surrounding the financing of investments and restructuring balance sheets” to reduce non-deductible debt, he said. “And I think a lot are thinking that they have to make investments to remain competitive.”

Stifel’s institutional business also saw record net revenues. Revenues came in at $332 million for the fourth quarter, up 31 percent year over year, and $1.1 billion for the full year, up 10 percent from 2016.