UBS continues to dive deep into the private banking space to grab huge teams with massive assets and massive revenue streams. The private banking teams are also loaded with UHNW assets attached to groupings of households, family offices, and institutional accounts. The strategy is running on ‘full blast’ at the moment with another announcement just yesterday.
The announcement yesterday focused on a group that joined the Private Wealth division of UBS in Miami, and includes Doris Neyra and Melissa Van Putten-Henderson as well as highly regarded CSA Gina Jamurath. They had been generating $14 million a year in annual revenue, and we were passed a note that their assets are a smidge above $2.5B.
Those numbers have been consistent with the private banking ‘big game’ hunting that UBS has been focused on for the better part of 6-9 months at firms like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citi. This particular move out of Wells Fargo’s private banking operation is the first of its kind, and you can bet will widen the eyes of recruiters across the country.
Wells Fargo has struggled with advisor retention based on the client account opening scandal in their traditional wealth management channels. Their private banking ranks have been largely untouched… now, all bets are off. Expect more of these announcements to make their way to competitor firms over the second half of this year.
As per the private wealth division at UBS – its ranks continue to bulge as each of these types of private banking teams are slotted into that ’tier’ of the UBS ecosystem here in the US. It is quite obvious that UBS is making a bet on a calculated and aggressive lunge upmarket. Across the globe UBS remains the largest wealth manager amongst its peers. A few global investment banks may have larger market caps and other divisions that denote larger overall banking scale; but UBS is solely focused on asset management. In that category they lead and are having enormous success selling that set of facts.
This isn’t a blip on the radar for UBS and private banking hires, rather its a movement. Expect these announcement to increase in frequency and increase in size. Whispers abound that even larger teams are on their way to UBS (potentially 2-3x the size of this team in Miami), and the private banks they’ve been exiting from have yet to figure it out.
