You know the old saying on Wall Street “the trend is your friend?’’ Well, that is certainly the trend at Merrill/BOA. Or should we call it when it was, Merrill Lynch which was the envy of Wall Street for decades? Now it’s down to just Merrill/BOA, and then minimized down to just Merrill, a BOA company/division, and predictably will just be Bank of America alone. It’s no wonder why one resident director manager source who we spoke with on condition of anonymity “it’s a spigot here”.Even managers are now looking to exit.
Consider Roshan Ghaznavi, who also was a resident director joined UBS yesterday morning. He started at ML in 2008 and has been Resident Director of the Woodland Hills office doing $4.3M in revenues on $600M AUM. He was also part of the AGM advisory counsel at Merrill and was well respected within the group and by his colleagues at the firm. He is joined by his junior partner Matt Seukunian and 2 client associates.
Adding to the exits at Merrill, Brian Coatoam also left earlier this week. He was producing $3.6M on $560M moved to RBC from the Winter Park/Orlando area.
“Advisors from Merrill are being heavily sought after by all firms including many independent platforms,” says Roger Gershman, a recruiter who specializes in Merrill Lynch teams.
According to several of our sources of industry professionals, many advisors at Merrill are just fed up with what is clearly a major cultural shift and a different means of doing business than they have been accustomed to. A spokesperson at Merrill did not immediately return a request for comment.
“We are fielding a good amount of unsolicited calls from advisors who also care to receive top dollar for their practice and platform is best for their clients whether a bank or complete independence. “
Firms seem to be offering bigger money to ML teams than other firms with some aggressively increasing their offers for the last half of 2022. Advisors are taking notice and using this to their advantage to achieve the highest economics ever seen.
“The writing is on the wall” says another advisor in the search to exit imminently.
