All over the country cell phones were hot, managers were sweating it out, and transition teams were working overtime. As expected, the long weekend produced all manner of headlines across wealth management recruiting and there were clear winners and losers.
First, a bit of a comeback for Merrill Lynch as they landed a massive private naming team out of BNY Mellon. To the tune of a reported $15M in annual revenue.
Per media reports:
”Four advisors and three associates led by Kristofer Reddaway and Kevin Sierzant joined Merrill’s private wealth management unit for “upper-high-net-worth” clients on Thursday in Newport Beach, Sierzant confirmed. The team focuses primarily on fee-based planning and portfolio management for privately held business owners and executives, and was overseeing about $2.3 billion of customer assets, exclusive of loans, he said.”
Merrill Lynch has been doing more and more ‘private banking’ deals of late, leading to some interesting speculation. More on that in articles to come.
First Republic was also a big winner, landing a massive team in Washington state. Per our article early Friday:
”First Republic just landed a massive team from Wells Fargo in Bellevue, Washington – led by Nichole Heidrick. We’ve yet to confirm final numbers, but we hear that the team manages better than $2B in client assets and annualized revenue that stretches beyond $4M.” Huge win for the continually growing First Republic brand.
Not so lucky was UBS, losing teams to Wells Fargo and headlines regarding executive level chaos associated with their CEO search in Switzerland and here in the US WMA. Those headlines left UBS out of the ‘winning’ recruiting headlines on an important weekend.
Wells Fargo was a net loser for landing a decent size UBS squad in the Midwest (Pete Kaldis was unavailable for comment), but then losing a massive team in Washington, as mentioned above.
Other firms like LPL and Rockefeller made moves, and those will be covered in stories to come. Active weekend as expected.
